Tax Credit Advisor Article Archives

A new crop of digital community engagement tools is giving developers an avenue to bring resident voices into the planning process without requiring attendance at long public meetings.

Sindy Spivac, the West Region Market executive for Bank of America’s Community Development Banking Division, spoke with Caleb Roope, president and CEO of The Pacific Companies about overseeing multiple interrelated companies in the areas of development, finance, architecture, construction and property ownership

There may still be some lingering misperception that the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) is not for housing. While the NMTC is primarily used for economic development, there are three cases where it can support affordable housing. One is if the commercial and housing components of a project are segregated into separate legal condominiums. The second is if Low Income Housing Tax Credits are not used in the deal. And the third is if the residential rents do not exceed 80 percent of revenue in the project.

After the 2024 elections, many in the multifamily affordable housing sector worry that key Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funds may be clawed back by the incoming administration. These funds provide tax credits, grants and other forms of incentives for green and clean energy deployment and have been crucial to closing the funding gap for multifamily affordable housing in recent years.

One way to achieve economies of scale in affordable housing is to acquire two adjacent properties, renovate both and then run them as a single entity. That’s what Affordable Housing and Services Collaborative (AHSC) is doing in Dorchester, MA, a neighborhood of Boston.

Just as markets are the crowdsourced wisdom on values, insurance is the crowdsourced wisdom on risks.

Over the past decade, few segments of the population have felt the squeeze of the country’s affordable housing crisis as acutely as middle-income households earning between 60 and 120 percent of the area median income. Earning too much to qualify for most government-subsidized housing programs but too little to afford the majority of new housing stock entering the market, these renters are finding themselves less and less able to secure high-quality housing within their means.

Earlier this fall, Jennifer Leimaile Ho was elected chair of the National Council of State Housing Agencies’ (NCSHA) 2025 Board of Directors. Ho is the Commissioner of Minnesota Housing, having been appointed by Governor Tim Walz in January 2019 and reappointed in 2023.

Any outside observer may assume some unease amongst the low-income housing industry. Buffeted on the one hand by residual stressors from the COVID-19 pandemic and on the other by the uncertain prospects of an incoming federal administration keen on cutting spending and shrinking government programs, the affordable housing landscape is experiencing an inflection point.

This fall, the National Council of State Housing Agencies (NCSHA) recognized 17 programs offered by state housing finance agencies across the nation that creatively developed tools to tackle their communities’ affordable housing challenges.

A Honolulu bank building has been turned into affordable housing for very low-income residents with an adaptive reuse funded through Historic Tax Credits (HTC), Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) and subsidies from city, county and state sources.

For an affordable multifamily housing project to qualify for the maximum allowable amount of four percent LIHTCs, at least 50 percent of the project’s aggregate basis (consisting of eligible basis plus land) must be financed with the proceeds of tax-exempt bonds issued pursuant to an allocation of private activity bond volume cap by a state housing authority or another municipal issuer (the 50 percent test).