Paul Connolly Author Archives

This has been a fun issue of Tax Credit Advisor for me to work on. We’re helping National Housing & Rehabilitation Association (NH&RA) kick off its 50th anniversary celebration in 2022.

The new year always brings new hopes and the potential for a fresh start. I try to be a glass half full kind of guy, but it’s tough as we slog through the third winter of the global pandemic.

It’s the time of year many companies conduct performance reviews. If I were 2021’s supervisor, I think I would give the year an “exceeds expectations” rating.

In this month’s issue, Mark Fogarty reports on a rehab of the Miriam Apartments in Chicago. Originally built in 1925 as housing for seniors.

This month in Tax Credit Advisor, we’re taking a look at resident services. “Two weeks to flatten the curve” has turned into 84 weeks, or a year-and-a-half. After a summer of optimism thanks to vaccines and falling COVID-19 cases and deaths, the virus came roaring back.

Autumn is a season of change. While many poets refer to spring as the season of rebirth, I tend to think of the fall more as the marking of a new life cycle. September has always been my favorite month, when the heat and humidity yield to cooler, drier air. It’s generally a much more pleasant time in my view. While spring is nice, it also marks the nearing of oppressive summer heat in the Washington, DC, area where I live.

Seems like I got a lucky draw when I was born in the United States, the wealthiest nation in the world. I was fortunate to be alive for the final Apollo mission when Americans last set foot on the surface of the moon. As a kid, I watched the first Space Shuttle launch in 1981 and with 135 missions over 30 years, they hardly made the news anymore by the time I was an adult.

In this issue, we look to the states to see when and how this new funding will make its way into local affordable housing markets around the country. As the director of the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency notes, this is a “bespoke” industry where no two deals are exactly alike. That presents a challenge as states are figuring out how to deploy all these new resources and are stepping up to the plate to do so equitably and effectively. Many states will use it to help address the housing disparities JCHS cites in its report. Make no mistake, this investment is such that hasn’t been seen since the start of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program decades ago.

This issue of Tax Credit Advisor focuses on asset management. We have several engaging articles on how to determine when to sell or hold properties, the relative success of using private placement and a look at how property managers and owners are preparing to restart inspections this month after being on hold for more than a year during the pandemic.

Regular readers of this column know I’m a native of Maine, the “Pine Tree State.” As the nickname implies, it’s a place that has more forests than urban and suburban areas. All those trees have helped power Maine’s economic engine in the form of paper, logging and lumber mills. And remember that shortage of swabs for COVID-19 tests last year? Yep, lots of those wooden sticks with a cotton ball on the tip are manufactured in Maine.

While COVID-19 may be accelerating design and construction changes in multifamily housing in the near term, larger market forces are at work and will influence how homes are built over the longer term, speakers at the National Council of Housing Market Analysts (NCHMA) said at the NCHMA Spring Meeting last month.

Think about affordable housing. What image comes into your mind? Is it a cutting-edge piece of architecture? A boxy looking brutalist tower design from the 1960s? A row of townhouses on a city street?