Monthly Columns Archives

The majority of our issues of Tax Credit Advisor are built around themes. In those months we try to tell a story with a beginning, a middle and an end on subjects, such as housing and healthcare, asset management or one of the tax credits.

I walked outside the Santa Lucia train station in Venice, boarded the vaparetto (or water bus) down the Grand Canal and found myself surrounded by palaces and churches, some five and six centuries old. Suddenly transported into hundreds of years of history, the short-term view no longer seemed as significant nor as inspiring as the long-term perspective.

So long have the Historic and Low Income Housing Tax Credits existed substantively unchanged that we take both for granted, not just in their existence but also in their particulars – procedural switches that were set one way for the Historic Credit, another for the LIHTC.

In our office, in addition to publishing Tax Credit Advisor, we manage organizations that address the needs of aging Americans. This has inspired me to be a collector of stories about creative aging solutions, including many in housing. Some of my favorites—including MetaHousing’s Arts Colonies, senior housing that contains art studios, music studios and theaters, and the Actors Fund residences where people get to spend later life with others with whom they shared an occupation—have been covered previously in these pages.

Just to our north lies a country whose population, eight percent less than California’s, is spread out over a land two percent larger than America, a country whose dominant language is the same as ours, and whose housing challenges are a refracted mirror image of ours at home, with fragments that are like ours but assembled in configurations entirely different from ours.

Working in various businesses for almost five decades now, perhaps the most significant change I have seen is the dependence upon data.

If asset management is the core competency of durable developers and investors, then asset valuation is a core skill of durable asset managers, and one that’s often under-resourced.

When the conversation turns to high cost, we wish it would go away. We are defensive, hesitant, technical and long-winded; modes of argument that make the industry look like complacent apologists for the status quo. Though our mode of argument hasn’t cost us yet, if we allow others to frame the debate, inevitably it will.

“Longevity is going to change everything,” says Kathryn Lawler, executive director of the Atlanta Regional Collective for Health Improvement and one of the most popular presenters on the aging conference circuit.

For every employee seeking affordable housing, there is an employer wishing the employee finds it – and not knowing how it can be created. Yet what employers can do is enormous, if we show them how to deploy the resources they already have.

I grew up in a suburban community of 18,000 in which the homes were built on potato fields and mostly bought with the help of the G.I. Bill. Walking to school, I would say hello to the local firemen who were playing handball against the wall of the firehouse. When the cops were called by neighbors to break up a backyard party that got too loud, we knew them by name.

It is the curse of the expert to be unaware of what regular folks don’t know about his or her subject.