Tax Credit Advisor Article Archives

As we reported in last month’s issue, technology is transforming the commercial real estate and affordable housing sectors. It’s an exciting time of innovation; however, expectations for some of the industry giants have certainly been tested after SoftBank’s recent write downs of its investments in the panelization-unicorn Katerra and co-working-unicorn WeWork.

Today, just as we finish editing this issue, a letter with signatures representing 1,000 organizations and companies has been delivered to the chairs of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee urging for extension of the New Markets Tax Credit program, which is due to expire at the end of this year.

A recent article on the Bisnow East Coast website reported that, according to a survey by the Associated General Contractors of America, “Across the U.S., 43 percent of construction firms reported that their costs had been higher than anticipated due to labor shortages, while 44 percent reported having to lengthen project timelines because of the issue.”

“For the first time since we built the pyramids, we need to rethink the way we build things.” Cecil Phillips, chairman and chief executive of Atlanta, GA-based Place Properties, spoke those words at NH&RA’s Summer Institute in July, and emphasized them again when I interviewed him recently.

It’s not true that construction is the least digitized niche of the national economy. For instance, Keith Stacker told a recent meeting of top affordable housing executives, agriculture is less digitized than construction. And so is hunting.

It has been more than a century since Henry Ford figured out that the best way to produce automobiles was on assembly lines in huge factories, and now the industry is investing billions of dollars in developing technologies for autonomous vehicles.

Mobile homes have long been stigmatized in America. During my recent drive along U.S. route 460, it was easy to see why. Stretching through the heart of Appalachia—eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia and southern West Virginia—I saw along the mountain hollow highway the poorest version of this housing type.

Offsite construction is generating a lot of buzz on how it can transform affordable and workforce housing. But some are dreaming even bigger. Could OS create a totally private tax credit market, without the need for public money?

Floor by floor, an apartment building is being fabricated in China and built in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles.

A philosophical feud over the soul of affordability that has been ongoing for most of a century may have reached a turning point.

Rick Holliday and his colleagues at Factory_OS aren’t very ambitious. They just want to change the way housing is built in this country.

While reading on a recent flight back to Washington, I was really moved by two feature articles that together put into context how far we have come as a country in alleviating poverty – and how far we still have to go.