Tax Credit Advisor Article Archives

“In the affordable housing industry, there has long been a recognition that one size doesn’t fit all,” declares Bill Whitman, owner of New Community Partners and a partner at Somerset Development Company in Washington, DC.

Last June, attorney Wade Norris reported in these pages on the increasing demand for tax-exempt, multifamily bonds throughout the United States and noting that several states were burning through volume cap.

James Rubin has one of the most interesting public sector jobs in the country. Since May 2015, Rubin has served as Commissioner of New York State Homes and Community Renewal, the top leadership position for the state’s many housing and community development agencies.

Larry Lawyer was exhausted. He had spent all day at Insatiable Investor’s annual conference in Jackson Hole. The conference was abuzz with speculation on the newly elected president. Would there be corporate tax reform and would that kill the tax credit investment market? Yields for investors were already at historic lows.

Among those destabilized by the aftershocks from our recent presidential election are many of my colleagues and friends, for whom the conjoining of ‘tax reform’ and ‘Trump’ have had an effect on their check-writing hands similar to a crowbar whacking their ulnar nerves.

As the organizational structure of the affordable housing and community development finance industry matures, financial intermediaries, investors and developers are fashioning new resources and methods for accomplishing their goals. With an aging Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and HUD property inventory, a wide variety of property acquisition, property recycling and organizational capitalization and revitalization needs materialized.

Some years in high school feel so long, you feel like you live there. Now Jim Whitten does. More than 50 years after he graduated, Whitten returned to old Cony High School building in Augusta, Maine, this time as his new home. Cony High has become an affordable senior housing community.

Despite the extended and rancorous election season we just endured, as I look back over the past 12 months I think our industry had a pretty good year. By and large, owners and developers benefited from historically low interest rates and high tax credit equity pricing. Sellers benefited from low cap-rates, and there continues to be a strong demand for rental properties in most markets.

In this issue, you will find detailed reporting on everything mentioned above from that informative day in Boston. NH&RA’s Fall Forum was the concert. This issue is the album.

“Technology Overtakes Tobacco in Winston- Salem, N.C.,” read the headline of an article by Keith Schneider in The New York Times of April 28, 2015, describing the mid-size Carolina city’s new, and still developing, Wake Forest Innovation Quarter.

Few people are better qualified to oversee the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) program than the current director of the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund (CDFI Fund), Annie Donovan.

Market liquidity exists when the environment is ripe for assets to be bought and sold at stable prices.