Monthly Columns Archives

Is it bragging if I open this issue by declaring it a win-win? Actually, it’s a win-win-win-win—for affordable housing management, for their residents, for government and for our readers.

Many executives I know and respect are afflicted with what I’ve dubbed the perception of essentiality – the belief that not only is their work broadly essential to the organization, each element of how they do it is likewise essential and personal, else the organization suffers.

Finance is not subsidy, though they are easily confused in people’s minds. Affordable housing always needs subsidy in one form or another – so why the recent fascination with state and local housing bonds?

I bonded with Ballotpedia.

Hey, all you folks out there oozing over OZones: remember New Markets Tax Credits?

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.