Monthly Columns Archives

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.

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.