Tax Credit Advisor Article Archives

YouthBuild’s origin story goes back to 1978, when Dorothy Stoneman, a Harvard-educated civil rights and community activist educator in East Harlem, surveyed the students with whom she worked, asking how they thought they could best improve their neighborhoods if they had some adult support.

We cannot deny we have a national housing crisis. A new study commissioned by the National Multifamily Housing Council recently found that the U.S. must add 325,000 new apartments annually to meet rising demand, while the average production over the past four years has only been 244,000 units per year.

“Longevity is going to change everything,” says Kathryn Lawler, executive director of the Atlanta Regional Collective for Health Improvement and one of the most popular presenters on the aging conference circuit.

I have enjoyed a long career in affordable housing development and have spent more than a decade working for Artspace, the nation’s largest nonprofit developer for artist housing.

New York City is undergoing the most audacious expansion of affordable housing in a generation, planning to add 200,000 units of new affordable housing over ten years. The idea came from Mayor Bill de Blasio, who announced his Housing New York plan after winning the election in 2014.

After more than a decade’s abandonment, a beloved Chicago landmark has come back to life.

New multifamily housing construction frequently includes a mix of market-rate apartments and low-income units.

Seattle, WA—The rise of micro apartments in urban America’s strongest real estate markets is often branded as a hot new trend. But really, it is a reenactment of the way U.S. cities have long worked.

In the early 1970s, the well-heeled residents of Aspen and Telluride, CO, faced a problem. Though they were often part-timers from the two coasts and other major cities who spent only weeks at a time in the two ski resort towns, their presence had priced out the very people they needed to run the towns and local businesses.

For every employee seeking affordable housing, there is an employer wishing the employee finds it – and not knowing how it can be created. Yet what employers can do is enormous, if we show them how to deploy the resources they already have.

High housing costs are an urban American problem, and there is boundless debate on how to address it. Should developers be allowed to build unfettered, or be restricted on the prices they charge and number of units they erect? Should individual buyers compete in open markets, or get government subsidies? Should public officials be Yimby or Nimby?

On a taxi ride into Denver I counted 27 cranes – a staggering amount of construction. An article in the local paper reported that developers delivered 3,246 new multifamily apartments in the first quarter alone and 10,000 in total are expected to be delivered by year end! A local real estate executive told me that 100 millennials move to Denver every day.