Monthly Columns Archives

In 2001, roughly as the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC)was coming into effect, Apple introduced the iPod.

What is the future of affordable housing in America going to look like? Are we as a society going to have the will and as an industry going to have the means to significantly increase volume and accommodate everyone from the lowest incomes to the middle-income workforce?

So powerful is the fear of the devil we don’t know that though everyone who works in affordable housing will admit privately that, as currently regulated, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) is broken in a policy sense, few will voice this publicly.

To stay profitable, an intermediary (syndicator, CDFI, mortgage originator, donor/technical assistance provider, development consultant) always has to have its own proprietary value proposition – a statement we make about ourselves that, if believed to be true, leads inevitably to the conclusion, ‘Do business with us’.

The word that stands out throughout this issue is community. We didn’t plan it that way. But in stories devoted to a wide range of subjects, including multi-credit deals, Opportunity Zones, state funding for housing and even NH&RA’s 2018 Vision Award honorees, the concept of community demanded attention.

We may call it work, but for many of you it is really daily problem solving.

On September 6, 2008, the federal government nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a measure without precedent in global financial history, even more systemically dramatic than Pierpont Morgan’s single-handedly underwriting global liquidity to stop the Panic of 1907.

The storm you see on the cover of this issue is not, I promise you, a metaphor for the federal government or the NBA or Harvey Weinstein’s life. It’s just a storm, like the three that hit Florida last year, the same year that fires seered parts of California, as well as properties owned by some NH&RA members in the northeast.

For affordable housing transactors, the goal line is the closing, and as it approaches, vision narrows until nothing exists but that.

The first slide you see shows that the Congressional Budget Office may forecast GDP growth in 2018 and 2019 due to recent tax changes, but point to a significant and fairly steady decrease after that.

Seventy years ago, American employers and insurance companies responded to the post-World War II economic and baby boom by developing over 50,000 apartments of largely unregulated private urban workforce housing rentals.

This spring, engineering professors and students from universities across the country descended upon the sprawling, tree-filled campus of Stony Brook University, just a few miles from where Long Island meets the Sound, to explore technical innovations aimed at helping people age in their homes.