Tax Credit Advisor Article Archives

Public housing is threatened – again – with deep funding cuts in the latest proposed federal budget, released in March by President Donald Trump.

Among the many innovative housing programs devised by the Obama Administration was the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), which Congress authorized in 2012 to test a new way of meeting the large and growing capital improvement needs of the nation’s aging public housing stock.

On the morning of Friday, November 15, 2013, a 150-person combined force of the Detroit Police Department and SWAT team, Michigan State Police, the state department of corrections, the FBI and ATF executed a raid on the Colony and Fisher Arms Apartments at 9303 East Jefferson Avenue, on Detroit’s east side.

The Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program began in 2012 with the purpose of addressing a $26 billion backlog of deferred maintenance for public housing.

We all know the PHA program faces approximately $27 billion shortfall for capital improvements. HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program was designed in large part to finance these capital improvements.

San Francisco, CA—Before entering San Francisco, I’d heard that high housing costs were forcing even six-figure-salary techies into cramped apartments.

The voluntary public housing revolution has yet to cost HUD a dollar: in fact, the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) has leveraged $8.90 for every dollar of public housing funds deployed, generating $3.9 billion of construction investment on the 59,000 apartments that have closed, with another 126,000 on deck, which together are liberating 185,000 apartments from the 1.3 million home public housing inventory and awakening the hitherto squelched or sublimated entre- preneurial capacity of public housing authorities, many of whom may never have known they had it in them.

Created by the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) has become the most important resource for creating and maintaining affordable housing in the United States.

Affordable housing developers take on many risks during their day-to-day business. There is construction risk, interest rate risk, headline risk and, as we are experiencing more and more, political risk.

In 2015, San Francisco approved the largest conversion of government housing into private ownership in American history.

In 2011, on a Labor Day break from her job as the State of Washington’s junior Senator, Maria Cantwell joined a party of five to climb 14,000 feet to the peak of Grand Teton.

America’s burgeoning pro-housing movement has many layers, and I recently witnessed one of them firsthand on a rare rainy night in Los Angeles.