Monthly Columns Archives

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.

As Alliant Capital’s executive vice president, Dudley Benoit oversees the company’s Low Income Housing Tax Credit production teams, originations and investor relations.

Pop quiz, hotshot: You’re mountain-biking down a virgin trail making great time, when it abruptly turns much steeper and much rockier. Trying to stop now will just launch you headfirst over the handlebars. What do you do?

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.

In 1898, New York City hosted the first international conference of urban planners to tackle an urgent global crisis of health, congestion and overcrowding – what to do about the horses?

In 2003, 13 of the largest nonprofit affordable housing providers, who today collectively manage 147,500 units, formed the Stewards of Housing for the Future (SAHF) to collaborate on best practices and advocate for change in Washington, DC and across the affordable housing ecosystem.

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.

Never in my professional experience has a government defendant so cavalierly offered up a gratuitous admission against interest as did President Biden the day the Centers for Disease Control “independently” announced that it had miraculously discovered authority to reimpose a nationwide eviction moratorium.

In the fall of 2019, Gilbert Winn, the CEO of Boston-based WinnCompanies, formed a task force to explore new ways to reduce eviction rates within the company’s affordable housing portfolio. Five months later COVID-19 hit, but the task force continued to meet and hash out ideas and best practices that would be refined throughout 2020.

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.

As I showed in last month’s Guru, under-reinvested urban neighborhoods are left behind or shortchanged on economic capital, political capital, municipal infrastructure, coordinated government policy and local income and earning power.

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.