icon Blueprint for September

Feel the Burn

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3 min read

The flames glowing along the Providence River you see on this month’s cover are part of an event called WaterFire, that began as an artistic installation and has grown into an annual Rhode Island arts festival and celebration. When the photos of this event were presented at the NH&RA Summer Institute, I immediately decided this would be our next cover, for two reasons:

  1. the new headquarters for WaterFire are being financed by “twinning” of New Markets and Historic Tax Credits, a unique process you can read about in Joel L. Swerdlow’s story, “Twinning” Tax Credits; and
  2. flames on water struck me as an apt metaphor for topics our writers were going to tackle in these pages, burning issues, urgent ideas, that concern us and defy being doused.

At the top of the list – and our lead piece – is the impact of the Supreme Court’s disparate impact decision, for which we now have a year of history and a small number of court decisions. We asked attorney Harry Kelly of Nixon Peabody to review the decisions made in response to the ruling and explain what they mean going forward. (Wrestling with Disparate Impact)

The Community Reinvestment Act is in its 40th year of implementation and has both encouraged funding for affordable housing and influenced where projects are located. It would seem that the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing  (AFFH) rule that came from HUD following the Court’s disparate impact decision can be in conflict with the CRA requirements. And so we asked staff writer Mark Olshaker to survey a variety of industry participants – developers, investors, community officials, regulators – about the results of CRA and how they might be influenced by AFFH. (The Efficacy of CRA)

Methods of funding development and preservation, as well as management of assets are always hot topics. In his New Developments column this month (p. 5), NH&RA Executive Director Thom Amdur looks at the drift towards the usage of tax exempt bonds and the need to prevent that finance mechanism from being limited by volume caps. And NH&RA’s latest staff addition, Policy Manager Christian Robin, makes his debut in TCA by exploring amenities that can be utilized to raise rents in Section 8 projects in between capitalizations. (Raising Rent Via Amenities)

In addition to the WaterFire project, this month we present two other case studies, both by staff writer Bendix Anderson, that utilized New Markets and/or

Historic Tax Credits and had important social impacts in their communites: The Uniqueness of Blue Butterly looks at the development of housing for homeless vets and women who experienced sexual abuse and Providence in Providence visits Amos House, as it expands into the largest soup kitchen in Rhode Island.

And please do not overlook this month’s provocative The Guru Is In column in which David A. Smith proposes innovations to create appropriate housing for refugees.

Do you feel the burn yet? Just turn this page and I know you will.

Marty Bell, Editor