Mark Fogarty Author Archives

An egalitarian spirit of co-locating affordable renters in a development along with middle-income residents and market-rate occupants is a housing idea that is being seen more and more. One such effort is in Springfield, MA, where a rehab is underway to create revitalized housing for a population that includes all three types: affordable, workforce and market-rate renters.

The Sursum Corda development in Washington, DC is a huge and hugely complicated deal. One thing that is helping to bring more than 1,000 planned units of housing to the capital neighborhood is structuring separate condominiums for the affordable and market-rate units.

USA Properties Fund thinks big.

By developing a large number of affordable housing units in its projects, the Roseville, CA-based firm helps house more families and develops economies that reduce costs.

Private placements may make up to three quarters of the affordable multifamily housing bond market, but that doesn’t mean that publicly offered bonds are a weak sister. In fact, growth in tax-exempt bond public offerings may be even larger than the increase in private placements in 2021.

If you used painting as a metaphor for mixed-income housing projects, Nashville’s Envision Cayce would need to be displayed on a very large canvas indeed. Perhaps on the scale of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. And if everything works out the way it has started, people may well be calling it a masterpiece soon.

Low interest rates are enabling refinancing on multifamily projects that can free up money for developers to use on additional affordable and workforce housing production.

Private placements, with their higher loan proceeds, additional flexibility and with less complexity than many other affordable housing executions, now make up more than 70 percent of the tax-exempt bond market and volumes are set to grow again this year.

Teachers will be returning to Washington, DC’s Malcolm X Elementary School, which closed in 2013. The city is renovating the old school to put in place a permanent home for an “early college” high school. But now they will also have the chance to live adjacent to the new school in a new development, as part of a District initiative to boost housing for educators.

Extensive consultation with the residents of Washington, DC’s Ward 7 gave city officials and developers a clear sense of how local folk would like to see a vacant old school in the Marshall Heights section redeveloped. The residents wanted housing. Lots of it, rentals and homeownership units, housing for seniors, affordable, workforce, market rate. They wanted commercial properties, retail. Perhaps most of all, they wanted a grocery store for a neighborhood that currently doesn’t have one.

A troubling spike in lumber prices may not break until later this year, as a badly out-of-whack supply and demand equation continues to roil the construction industry.

Residents at Foothill Villas Apartments in San Bernardino, CA stand to save more than $1,000 apiece in electricity costs after a solar photovoltaic system is installed as part of an extensive acquisition and rehab made possible by Low Income Housing Tax Credits.

From the evidence of the Boston area, one good way to get a transit-oriented development (TOD) done is to site a housing project either directly adjacent to a transit line or on unused transit property itself. This month Tax Credit Advisor is featuring the third in a series of these Boston TODs, an ambitious development called Bartlett Station, going up on an old bus yard in the city’s Roxbury section.