Mark Fogarty Author Archives

With the opening of a third phase of housing and a giant marketplace and food court modeled on Boston’s historic Fanueil Hall and New York’s Chelsea Market, an epic mixed-income, mixed-use historic development is nearing completion in Rochester, NY, after 12 years of creative and complicated work.

Affordable housing is well-known for needing multiple funders to make developments viable. But according to Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge, effective collaboration extends beyond funding to operations as well.

One of the challenges of housing finance in rural areas is that properties are so spread out, it sometimes is hard to achieve the kind of numbers you need to make a project work.

Not many 19th century courthouses get turned into 118 units of multifamily rental housing.

More and more, developers and architects are having to pay attention to climate change, especially when building anything near water.

Fifteen years ago, residents of the historic Miriam Apartments in Chicago got together to create a grand mosaic, a bright and beautiful therapeutic work of art that symbolized the positive aspects of what living there meant to them.

The Stuyvesant Motor Co. building in downtown Cleveland is a landmark structure from the city’s manufacturing heyday but had also been a decaying eyesore for decades.

The human element is always going to be the most important factor in providing resident services, but technology is what helps a provider analyze and target services to achieve good metrics and even more importantly, useful results. National Church Residences has taken and run with this particular concept by designing its own in-house technology tool.

When Shawn Wilson, president of Blue Sky Communities, attended the recent ribbon cutting for the Clermont Ridge Senior Villas development in Clermont, FL, he saw something that made him think the seniors at the brand new development already felt at home. Many of them had put up wreaths on their front doors.

An ambitious joint venture is planning $2 billion in “middle-income” or workforce housing development in California. And in an unusual aspect of an effort that is targeting both new construction and existing housing, many of these middle-income workers will have units with luxury amenities.

Affordable housing owners and managers are working hard to help their tenants tap unused Federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) funds to stay current on rental payments, and many of them have been doing this since the program rolled out.

Where there’s a will there’s a way. A big senior affordable housing tower for sale near New York City and Newark, NJ generated a lot of interest in turning it into a market-rate project in a gentrifying neighborhood.