Mark Olshaker Author Archives

Each subsequent presidential administration brings a new and differing set of priorities. With the current one clearly focused on lowering taxes, building infrastructure, fighting terrorism and everything having to do with immigration, affordable housing is not likely to reach the top of the to-do list.

Telehealth has become a widely accepted and important component of the overall healthcare structure in the United States.

Sustaining Seniors Aging in Place Program (SSAIP) is an innovative program in Charleston, SC, that includes Telehealth/Telemedicine, a food pantry that has delivered more than 400,000 free meals, accessible transportation and a community garden among its offerings. It is all part of the pioneering approach to senior affordable housing instituted by that southern city’s Humanities Foundation.

“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.

“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.

The New Markets Tax Credit Program – NMTC – created as part of the Community Renewal Tax Relief Act of 2000, aimed to partner business and government as a means to revitalize disadvantaged and economically neglected communities and increase job availability and wealth for their residents.

NIMBY – “Not In My Back Yard” – has been a real estate rallying cry for generations – whether it replied to integration, ethnicity, unwanted businesses, addiction treatment centers or even architectural diversity. Affordable housing agencies and developers have borne the brunt of citizens’ action committees and organized, often ugly protests.

Like many complex industries, companies in affordable housing development encompass many functions and many moving parts. This suggests a great diversity of career opportunities.

Each year since 2004, NH&RA has bestowed its Affordable Housing Vision Award to affordable housing and community development leaders who have made valuable contributions to the field and demonstrated years of leadership, commitment and imagination.

What Maurice Barry does for a living is complex. It involves interpretation of often arcane laws and regulations, wending his way through dense and sometimes conflicting rules, working with owners and tenants to get them what they are legally entitled to, restructuring FHA loans and monitoring a broad spectrum of compliance issues.

It is no exaggeration to say that the progress of Fred Copeman’s career mirrors, tracks and helped foster the ascendancy of the housing and energy tax credit programs from their beginning following the 1986 Tax Reform Act – the legislation that overhauled the entire real estate tax shelter business.

The Community Reinvestment Act – CRA – was enacted in 1977 as a means of encouraging commercial banks and other consumer financial institutions to meet the needs of borrowers throughout the communities in which they operate. CRA has been credited with everything from ending the practice of discriminatory redlining to creating vibrant inner city neighborhoods, and blamed for everything from forcing banks to make unwise or over-leveraged loans to helping foment the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis.