David A. Davenport • 7 min read
The Supreme Court recently heard arguments in City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson, in a rare instance of the Court grappling with the issue of homelessness.
Abram Mamet • 10 min read
On May 29 of this year, HUD published a proposed rule update to its decades-old HOME Investment Partnerships program, a federal block grant that provides funding to hundreds of state and local jurisdictions for a diverse array of low- and moderate-income homeownership and rental activities.
Mark Fogarty • 8 min read
The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA), the official name of the COVID stimulus bill, wasn’t associated with housing at the time.
Pamela Martineau • 7 min read
Section 8 property owners who refinanced their debt through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Mark-to-Market program, mainly in the late 1990s through early 2000s, may qualify for budget-based rent adjustments under a new program launched this year by HUD.
Abram Mamet • 8 min read
Earlier this year, federal officials announced that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA)’s Risk-Sharing Initiative would be extended indefinitely, strengthening a resource that has become increasingly vital in recent years for State Housing Finance Agencies (HFAs).
Joanne Shelton • 5 min read
A rent comparability study (RCS) is often required for affordable and mixed-income rental developments.
Nushin Huq • 6 min read
The development and preservation of affordable housing units often require funding from multiple sources. One potential funding source for affordable housing developments for the lowest-income households is the National Housing Trust Fund.
David A. Smith • 6 min read
Names can outlive their purpose and their original meaning. Though the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, a cluster of mutually distrustful principalities with a largely symbolic head of state known as the Holy Roman Emperor maneuvered under that rubric for a thousand years after its 800 AD founding by Charlemagne before it was put to sleep by the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Such may yet be the fate of two venerable concepts, Fair Market Rent (FMR) and the Area Median Income (AMI).
Pamela Martineau • 6 min read
Office vacancies throughout the nation have reached a 30-year high and the country is amid an affordable housing crisis. These dual inflection points have increased housing advocates’ focus on conversions of commercial real estate into housing and encouraged federal and local governments to assist in the transformations.
Ethan Finlan • 7 min read
Since 2018, the City of Baltimore, the Housing Authority of Balti-more City (HABC), planners, architects and developers have been working on a comprehensive redevelopment of a large public housing project near the city’s famous Inner Harbor.
Kaitlyn Snyder • 4 min read
The needs of the public housing portfolio are well documented: annual shortfalls in Congressional funding dating back to the 1980s have contributed to an estimated capital backlog of $70 billion.
David A. Smith • 7 min read
In 1998, when North Carolina Democrat-turned-Republican Lauch Faircloth added the amendment for which he became infamous, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) were in a protracted bureaucratic standoff combining the worst features of medieval sieges and the First World War.