Tax Credit Advisor Article Archives

State tax credit allocators had a glass-half-empty message for housing market analysts at their recent affordable housing summit. But in describing their current robust allocation rounds, the glass seemed half full as well.

“We’ve developed, owned and operated affordable housing since 1994,” says Michael Costa of Align Finance Partners. “Now, as it has become progressively more difficult to produce housing for families and seniors of lesser means, we have created a new debt product to help finance the preservation and development of desperately needed affordable housing.”

When Shaun Donovan became Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in 2009 he was determined to find new ways to preserve at-risk public and assisted-housing developments. So he turned to Patrick Costigan, a 30-year veteran of affordable housing and community development and a senior vice president at The Community Builders, a Boston-based nonprofit developer and property owner, to help redirect the effort.

“I really like RAD projects,” declares Holly Bray, senior director of originations for Love Funding in Washington, DC. “You’re in the weeds, helping housing authorities take their housing stocks and making them great. There are a lot of things to figure out and a lot of coordination. But the end result is truly rewarding.”

What strategies can developers use for successful affordable housing preservation of tax credit properties that have hit the 15-year mark with negative equity?

Overall, Memphis is pretty old-school. As a city filled with rural migrants and defined by decades of slow growth, it maintains a dated and Southern feel.

In just two decades, “housing first” has turned from an academic idea into formal policy, becoming the default national strategy for curbing homelessness.

Confession time: these days I seldom go to big-tent national affordable housing conferences. Half a day’s panels of my peers discoursing in informed erudite polyphony on the latest Washington bad news past, present or possible future leaves me enervated.

Our vision of the American household is inaccurate and out dated.

On March 13, the National Low-Income Housing Coalition released a new report, “The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Rental Homes,” which finds that there is a shortage of 7.2 million affordable and available rental homes for extremely low income (ELI) households – a startling and sobering number.

A hugely ambitious public-private partnership is starting to see some big preservation projects getting finished in Baltimore.

As you begin to peruse this issue it will, at last, be April and a winter of cold and darkness in many regions of the country should be behind us. I have been commuting both to and from work in the darkness for so long now I sometimes wonder if I’m in Iceland rather than Washington, DC.