Monthly Columns Archives

This month in Tax Credit Advisor, we’re taking a look at resident services. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” has turned into 84 weeks, or a year-and-a-half. After a summer of optimism thanks to vaccines and falling COVID-19 cases and deaths, the virus came roaring back.

In 1898, New York City hosted the first international conference of urban planners to tackle an urgent global crisis of health, congestion and overcrowding – what to do about the horses?

In 2003, 13 of the largest nonprofit affordable housing providers, who today collectively manage 147,500 units, formed the Stewards of Housing for the Future (SAHF) to collaborate on best practices and advocate for change in Washington, DC and across the affordable housing ecosystem.

Autumn is a season of change. While many poets refer to spring as the season of rebirth, I tend to think of the fall more as the marking of a new life cycle. September has always been my favorite month, when the heat and humidity yield to cooler, drier air. It’s generally a much more pleasant time in my view. While spring is nice, it also marks the nearing of oppressive summer heat in the Washington, DC, area where I live.

Never in my professional experience has a government defendant so cavalierly offered up a gratuitous admission against interest as did President Biden the day the Centers for Disease Control “independently” announced that it had miraculously discovered authority to reimpose a nationwide eviction moratorium.

In the fall of 2019, Gilbert Winn, the CEO of Boston-based WinnCompanies, formed a task force to explore new ways to reduce eviction rates within the company’s affordable housing portfolio. Five months later COVID-19 hit, but the task force continued to meet and hash out ideas and best practices that would be refined throughout 2020.

Seems like I got a lucky draw when I was born in the United States, the wealthiest nation in the world. I was fortunate to be alive for the final Apollo mission when Americans last set foot on the surface of the moon. As a kid, I watched the first Space Shuttle launch in 1981 and with 135 missions over 30 years, they hardly made the news anymore by the time I was an adult.

As I showed in last month’s Guru, under-reinvested urban neighborhoods are left behind or shortchanged on economic capital, political capital, municipal infrastructure, coordinated government policy and local income and earning power.

In this issue, we look to the states to see when and how this new funding will make its way into local affordable housing markets around the country. As the director of the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency notes, this is a “bespoke” industry where no two deals are exactly alike. That presents a challenge as states are figuring out how to deploy all these new resources and are stepping up to the plate to do so equitably and effectively. Many states will use it to help address the housing disparities JCHS cites in its report. Make no mistake, this investment is such that hasn’t been seen since the start of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program decades ago.

As the pandemic has demonstrated, for people to be healthy, their homes must be healthy, and for homes to be healthy, their communities must be healthy. Work we’ve been doing for the last half a year in Black neighborhoods of Milwaukee has uncovered six deeply rooted and mutually reinforcing causes of unhealthy neighborhoods due to contagious underinvestment:

Exciting things are going on in Wisconsin. There’s a pilot program soon getting underway that will examine opportunities for expanding access to affordable workforce housing.

This issue of Tax Credit Advisor focuses on asset management. We have several engaging articles on how to determine when to sell or hold properties, the relative success of using private placement and a look at how property managers and owners are preparing to restart inspections this month after being on hold for more than a year during the pandemic.