Tax Credit Advisor Article Archives

What level of government should dictate housing policy? In America, decisions have long come from the local level, thanks to our small-government tradition.

In 1975, the year I got into this business, American residential rental housing was split into three utterly separate domains.

There’s no question that the 40 buildings in the Betances Portfolio in the Bronx borough of New York City can benefit from substantial rehabilitation. After all, the earliest of these Betances multifamily properties was constructed in 1906.

If adopted, President Trump’s FY-2020 budget would make significant cuts to HUD’s budget—overall, a $9.6 billion decrease from FY-2019 appropriated levels—and would zero out many critical community development programs entirely.

America is a big place – I would know. For the past three years, I’ve seen about as much of it as anyone could. As Tax Credit Advisor readers are likely aware of by now, I just completed a three-year cross-country journalism tour, living for a month each in 30 cities.

I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and though I’ve traveled around the United States and the world, personally and professionally, the Nation’s Capital has always been my home. The city has a static and somewhat clichéd image, based on our wealth of museums, monuments and other tourist attractions, as well as the less than attractive impressions emanating out of Capitol Hill and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Despite having one of the hottest economies in the country, Salt Lake City suffers from a shortage of affordable housing.

Mixed-income development is of increasing importance in the affordable housing industry.

A program to match real estate development with area transit lines in Portland, OR increasingly is targeting affordable housing after regional government found low-income residents ride metro area trains and buses more than other groups do.

On Friday, September 28, 2018, the city of Minneapolis released a 500-page comprehensive development plan that the mayor dubbed “a forward-thinking vision.”

Sometimes controversy can boost sales. A controversy that shows up repeatedly on your television and in your emails almost daily may irk you, but at the same time it pushes the issue front and center in all of our very crowded minds.

Over the last eight years, California’s Bay Area added 167,000 new homes, while adding four times as many jobs: 750,000. Yet when voters were asked to explain the causes of California’s runaway unaffordability, the worst in the nation, they cited lack of rent control first; restrictive zoning came in last.