Monthly Columns Archives

The future seems to have arrived on our doorstep. Robots have been employed to construct multifamily homes. If you’re a SciFi fan, you no longer have to go to the movies, you can visit a prefab housing factory instead.

Once it starts, a thunderstorm is unstoppable: the sunny seeming equilibrium of a moment before becomes a torrent whose cooling reinforces itself, reversing in a few minutes what took hours to build up.

Madi Ford is listening. As you will read in this month’s Talking Heads interview (p. 6), her team at MidCity Financial includes a director of community engagement, as well as additional staff committed to listening to the residents and to neighbors.

Because infrastructure always reaches the poorest last, its networks are always uneven. Because the business case for prevention can never be made until the cost of allowing failure is proven, preventive policies arise only after catastrophe.

Catastrophe is both precondition for and stimulus of three things – sudden extinction, explosive innovation and enduring reform. As all three happen speedily, each vies with the other two for primacy.

In these darkest of times, this month’s Tax Credit Advisor devotes our pages to hope.

Insufficient ventilation and insanitary surroundings reduce the vital resisting power of individuals exposed to such conditions; overcrowding causes closer contact with the infected individuals, and the absence of sunlight prevents the destruction of disease germs by nature’s principal disinfecting agent.

Our original game plan for May was to highlight case studies of the variety of options available in Private Activity Bonds. But this issue, like all of our lives, has been disrupted by the COVID-19 crisis. Private activity might also be the best description of our daily routines now as so many of us are restricted to our homes.

As our staff prepares this issue to go to press, we are not working side by side in our downtown DC offices as we usually do but rather each teleworking from our own homes.

When Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) was launched eight years ago, the public housing world was encased in its own hard shell: HUD officials speaking at NAHRO or CLPHA conferences to explain and cheerlead for the program were greeted with skepticism and suspicion only a skosh short of hostility.

Two years into the era of Opportunity Zones, its impact on our industry has been minimal: whatever benefit the OZone may provide other types of real estate, it’s not boosting Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) production.

It’s spring training time, when everyone is optimistic and hopes they can win the World Series.