Monthly Columns Archives

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.

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced last August that it was declaring a nationwide moratorium on all rental evictions, not just those in federally subsidized properties, I instantly thought, That’s unconstitutional. Somebody will sue the government and it’ll get overturned. Sure enough, on May 5, 2021 the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (DC for DC) did just that, and a good thing too, because well-met laws intended to offer short-term relief frequently do long-term damage – as I know from personal experience.

Asset managing can be challenging in the best of times but add a global pandemic to the equation and companies have had to reevaluate best practices to ensure peak property performance.

Regular readers of this column know I’m a native of Maine, the “Pine Tree State.” As the nickname implies, it’s a place that has more forests than urban and suburban areas. All those trees have helped power Maine’s economic engine in the form of paper, logging and lumber mills. And remember that shortage of swabs for COVID-19 tests last year? Yep, lots of those wooden sticks with a cotton ball on the tip are manufactured in Maine.

Dateline – June 1, 2023. National Housing & Rehabilitation Association announces the inaugural winner of its Hippo Award for Innovative Design in a Healthy Multifamily Property is Hygeia Developments’ Galen Apartments.

Supply chain delays, rising material costs, labor shortages. Construction companies have encountered these challenges before, but not during a global pandemic.

Think about affordable housing. What image comes into your mind? Is it a cutting-edge piece of architecture? A boxy looking brutalist tower design from the 1960s? A row of townhouses on a city street?

COVID-19 is in headlong retreat: infections down 70 percent since January, seven-day average hospitalizations and deaths down 66 percent and 77 percent. In less than six months, Covid-19 vaccines in America will have gone from impossibility through scarcity to surplus, with the administration announcing that “all willing American adults will be able to receive a COVID-19 vaccine by the end of May.”