Monthly Columns Archives

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.

In our cover story this month, staff writer Mark Olshaker interviews the leaders of the various tax credit coalitions on advocacy plans in the face of potential tax reform. (Defending the Forts).

One of the primary roles of the President of the United States is encouraging and overseeing creation. Nations have problems and we elect a head of state to find solutions.

The voluntary public housing revolution has yet to cost HUD a dollar: in fact, the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) has leveraged $8.90 for every dollar of public housing funds deployed, generating $3.9 billion of construction investment on the 59,000 apartments that have closed, with another 126,000 on deck, which together are liberating 185,000 apartments from the 1.3 million home public housing inventory and awakening the hitherto squelched or sublimated entre- preneurial capacity of public housing authorities, many of whom may never have known they had it in them.

Because the cycle of poverty is generational, to break it we must adopt a generational approach, enlisting the whole family so that those who are older can help those who are younger aspire to, and achieve, more than their parents did.

Transitions are times of anxiety and uncertainty. We know what we have, but we don’t know what we are going to get. Patience is probably the best antidote. It is difficult to anticipate outcomes. But that is not going to stop us.