Tax Credit Advisor Article Archives

Originally constructed in 1971, Denver Metro Village is a 191-unit affordable rental housing property serving seniors. It’s west of downtown Denver at West Colfax Avenue and Quitman Street, near Sloans Lake, the city’s largest, and is being preserved through a partnership with the nonprofit owner, manager and developer, MGL

Editor’s Note: To help NH&RA members and their residents through the COVID-19 crisis, we have been collecting information from numerous sources on responses by governments, housing agencies, companies and professional associations. We will run this feature in each issue, as long as the crisis persists.

Our original game plan for May was to highlight case studies of the variety of options available in Private Activity Bonds. But this issue, like all of our lives, has been disrupted by the COVID-19 crisis. Private activity might also be the best description of our daily routines now as so many of us are restricted to our homes.

Across the country, affordable housing developers are turning to private activity bonds (PABs) and four percent Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC or credit) to finance their affordable housing transactions since the nine percent LIHTC remains persistently oversubscribed.

As our staff prepares this issue to go to press, we are not working side by side in our downtown DC offices as we usually do but rather each teleworking from our own homes.

The rapid escalation of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is having a deeply unsettling impact on how we live and how we work. It is testing our disaster response system in unanticipated ways and will require a new kind of resilience from us.

“RAD has been the most positive experience I’ve had working with HUD,” states Richelle Patton, president of Collaborative Housing Solutions of Decatur, GA, a consulting firm that specializes in creative problem-solving to develop affordable rental housing. She specializes in HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration program, has been involved with around 18,000 RAD unit conversions and has served as a RAD transaction manager for HUD.

Sherrod Brown is a senior statesman who has devoted his entire adult life to politics—representing Ohio’s residents for 45 years—and become one of the most powerful lawmakers in the United States Congress.

It is a little counterintuitive to think of public housing, especially the big high rise towers whose problems have often been resolved by dynamiting them, as historic.

The Norris Homes project in Philadelphia has a little bit of everything. It is a Department of Housing and Urban Development Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) project. It is a Choice Neighborhoods Initiative. It uses Low Income Housing Tax Credits. It is a transit-oriented development (TOD). It is a green project. It even has a lender that provided both debt and equity for the financing.

Since its launch in 2011, the Rental Assistance Demonstration program (RAD) has put hundreds of  thousands of public housing units under private management, across 44 states plus DC. All this activity was spurred by HUD’s change in incentives – after decades of defunding public housing, HUD decided to allocate money for RAD, showing that privatization is the agency’s preferred future model. But RAD has also shot off because it’s being blended with other HUD tools that better enable public housing repair and conversion. Two of these tools are Section 18 and Rent Bundling. 

Many of today’s affordable housing policies, from inclusionary zoning to strengthened tenant protections, are—whether you agree with them or not—growing out of coastal urban America. But one relatively new HUD program, Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), has become a Southern thing.