Tax Credit Advisor Article Archives

In policy-speak, a “food desert” is a low-income area, usually urban, where affordable healthy food is hard to obtain, especially for those without a car. Similarly, a data desert is a low-income neighborhood, community, or multifamily property where in-home high-capacity broadband with Internet access is unavailable, unreliable, or expensive.

When completed next spring, Blue Butterfly Village in the San Pedro section of Los Angeles will be more than just another housing development. Rather, with affordable apartments and supportive services, it will provide a safe and nurturing environment for the special but vulnerable households that will have priority for occupancy: homeless women veterans and their children.

In Worcester, Mass., a former industrial city of 181,000 battered for decades by population and job losses, the federal new markets tax credit is helping to finance the redevelopment of five vacant downtown buildings once used by the local daily newspaper into a new urban education and business center.

The way that Tom Capp and Gorman & Company, Inc. approach the development of multifamily rental housing, historic preservation, and mixed-use real estate projects is to always be on the lookout – for new opportunities, funding sources, and lessons.

Great resident services are good business at Crest Avenue Apartments, in Charleroi, Pa., a community south of Pittsburgh.

The U.S. Departments of Treasury and Housing and Urban Development have established a new partnership designed to stimulate greater use of the Federal Housing Administration’s multifamily risk-share loan program and reduce borrowing costs for developers and owners.

In order to be competitive for new housing subsidies in most jurisdictions, the implementation of a resident services program is practically a threshold requirement. Of course, funding an effective program is a challenge.

Boston-based WinnCompanies has cut its electric bill for common areas by 25% at Loft 27, a 173-unit apartment building, as the result of efficiency retrofit and solar projects completed in 2012. The apartment development was created from the adaptive re-use of an historic former mill.

Boston Capital planned to launch a new national multi-investor fund in July with a projected after-tax IRR to investors of 6.75%, according to Tom Pereira. The fund is expected to close in October.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimates that the shortfall in federal appropriations for the Public Housing Operating and Capital Funds has created a backlog of more than $25 billion in needed physical improvements to the nation’s 1.2 million public housing units, or roughly $24,000 per apartment.

RAD, the public housing Rental Assistance Demonstration is in jeopardy of stalling for want of a simple legislative fix: Passage by Congress of a bill raising the current cap of 60,000 units to at least 185,000, or, better yet, eliminating the cap entirely.

In the first 10 years of the federal new markets tax credit (NMTC) program, 8,060 investments totaling $31.1 billion were made in 3,849 businesses and projects throughout the country, according to new data and a companion summary released by the Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund.