Monthly Columns Archives

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.”

Rather than providing, we seem to find ourselves in an era of taking away—and predominantly from those who need it most. Health insurance, Medicaid expansion, the right to remain here, access to birth control, endeavors to slow climate change, overall affordability.

Without realizing it, roughly 20 years ago American affordable housing drifted into its third new territory, and because its border isn’t demarcated, we’re wandering through it without a map.

In 1229, Christian monks in Jerusalem, rummaging about for parchment, unbound a centuries-old codex, scraped off what was written on it, refolded the leaves in half, and wrote atop the now-smaller book, at right angles, new liturgical texts for the Holy Land’s faithful knights.

In order to get our editorial and design staff home for the holidays, we are putting this issue to bed a week before the leaders of both houses of Congress ascertain they will vote on tax change.

By the time you read this, tax-exempt private activity bonds will be dead. Or they won’t. The New Markets Tax Credit will be dead. Or it won’t. The top corporate bracket will be 20 percent. Or it won’t.

As we reach our deadline for this issue, the two houses of Congress are playing ping pong with our tax code. If those on the House side of the table win, the New Markets Tax Credit may not survive. If those on the Senate side win, it may survive. And then again, either side can change its mind.

If a true test of a company’s sustainability is its ability to transition from a founding or visionary CEO or leadership team to a next generation of both, then the affordable housing industry is in a watershed, where we are about to discover how many of today’s leading companies will still be so in half a decade.

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.