David A. Smith Author Archives

When it comes to dealing with the looming or present expiration of judicial eviction moratoria, our industry should do what many of us have done whenever the economic times are out of joint: don’t litigate the past, negotiate the future.

When disruption threatens health and prosperity, whom does duty call, and to what action?

If the pandemic itself doesn’t decide the upcoming election, the voters’ judgment of their elected officials’ policy responses to its consequences will. And voters’ pandemic experiences are wildly diverse based on many things – most especially on their housing, what it is and where it is.

For 52 years, from the suburban house I grew up in, through four dorm rooms, a rent-controlled apartment, a condo and then two houses, there has sat on my bookshelves a thick densely printed small-print paperback. A few days ago, I pulled it down and read. Its sobering messages, now a half-century old, have recently taken on new resonance.

Once it starts, a thunderstorm is unstoppable: the sunny seeming equilibrium of a moment before becomes a torrent whose cooling reinforces itself, reversing in a few minutes what took hours to build up.

Because infrastructure always reaches the poorest last, its networks are always uneven. Because the business case for prevention can never be made until the cost of allowing failure is proven, preventive policies arise only after catastrophe.

Catastrophe is both precondition for and stimulus of three things – sudden extinction, explosive innovation and enduring reform. As all three happen speedily, each vies with the other two for primacy.

Insufficient ventilation and insanitary surroundings reduce the vital resisting power of individuals exposed to such conditions; overcrowding causes closer contact with the infected individuals, and the absence of sunlight prevents the destruction of disease germs by nature’s principal disinfecting agent.

When Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) was launched eight years ago, the public housing world was encased in its own hard shell: HUD officials speaking at NAHRO or CLPHA conferences to explain and cheerlead for the program were greeted with skepticism and suspicion only a skosh short of hostility.

Two years into the era of Opportunity Zones, its impact on our industry has been minimal: whatever benefit the OZone may provide other types of real estate, it’s not boosting Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) production.

Though their business necessarily compels them to accommodate people during overnight stays, hospitals are the country’s least willing landlords, forced into the role by a to-them-toxic rapid evolution of healthcare laws, pharmacological potency, and one-way urbanization.

When it comes to housing innovation urgency, states are where the action is. Stories in this issue ably document what and how, and as a big-picture counterpoint, allow me to tell you why, and what that means for your state.