Monthly Columns Archives

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.

When, in the 1960’s, Lyndon Johnson launched the federal government into the regulated public- private partnership era of affordable housing delivery, the initiative drew on two decades of multifamily rental experience, about which until very recently I knew nothing – the benevolent insurance-company as workforce housing investor/developer.

In the years of my youth, air travel was an occasion. The men dressed in suits and ties, the women in dresses, good meals were served with the elegance of a four-star restaurant and the rows of seats were comfortable.

Today the Guru turns 100.

Confession time: these days I seldom go to big-tent national affordable housing conferences. Half a day’s panels of my peers discoursing in informed erudite polyphony on the latest Washington bad news past, present or possible future leaves me enervated.

As you begin to peruse this issue it will, at last, be April and a winter of cold and darkness in many regions of the country should be behind us. I have been commuting both to and from work in the darkness for so long now I sometimes wonder if I’m in Iceland rather than Washington, DC.

For more than half a decade now, we’ve heard unicorn tales of Social Impact Bonds (SIBs), and despite a compelling common-sense soundbite case, SIB sightings are rare, volume is minimal and replicable scalability at best theoretical…because we are having trouble putting together the right ingredients, the right government counterparties and the right sponsors.

Early in my career, when I worked as a sportswriter, Sonny Werblin, then the head of Madison Square Garden and thus the boss of the Knicks and Rangers, said to me, “A budget is a strategy.”