Tax Credit Advisor Article Archives

When it comes to allocation of Low Income Housing Tax Credits and complementing Private Activity Bonds (PAB), there’s only so much to go around. The IRS distributes both forms of financing to states based on population; as noted by the Affordable Housing Finance website, the 2020 LIHTC allocation “will be the greater of $2.8125 multiplied by the state population, or the small state minimum of $3,217,500. For private-activity bonds, the amount used to calculate the volume cap will remain $105 multiplied by the state population. The state minimum will be $321,775,000.”

The Hilltop Apartments was a previously market-rate rental apartment project that sits near the eastern city limits of Washington, DC, in the Deanwood neighborhood. Built in the 1960s, it had become a run-down project within a gentrifying area, and the natural market direction might have been to demolish it and build new market-rate housing that commanded higher rents.

Insufficient ventilation and insanitary surroundings reduce the vital resisting power of individuals exposed to such conditions; overcrowding causes closer contact with the infected individuals, and the absence of sunlight prevents the destruction of disease germs by nature’s principal disinfecting agent.

Adrian Iglesias founded Generation Housing Development in Dallas, TX in 2002 with the mission to provide affordable multifamily housing for families and seniors, “in sustainable communities that residents and city leaders can be proud to call their own.”

Renovating affordable housing units in San Francisco isn’t very affordable. Redoing the 202 units at Eastern Park Apartments, for instance, is estimated to cost $171 million when finished in this ultra-high-cost housing market.

Originally constructed in 1971, Denver Metro Village is a 191-unit affordable rental housing property serving seniors. It’s west of downtown Denver at West Colfax Avenue and Quitman Street, near Sloans Lake, the city’s largest, and is being preserved through a partnership with the nonprofit owner, manager and developer, MGL

Editor’s Note: To help NH&RA members and their residents through the COVID-19 crisis, we have been collecting information from numerous sources on responses by governments, housing agencies, companies and professional associations. We will run this feature in each issue, as long as the crisis persists.

Our original game plan for May was to highlight case studies of the variety of options available in Private Activity Bonds. But this issue, like all of our lives, has been disrupted by the COVID-19 crisis. Private activity might also be the best description of our daily routines now as so many of us are restricted to our homes.

Across the country, affordable housing developers are turning to private activity bonds (PABs) and four percent Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC or credit) to finance their affordable housing transactions since the nine percent LIHTC remains persistently oversubscribed.

As our staff prepares this issue to go to press, we are not working side by side in our downtown DC offices as we usually do but rather each teleworking from our own homes.

The rapid escalation of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is having a deeply unsettling impact on how we live and how we work. It is testing our disaster response system in unanticipated ways and will require a new kind of resilience from us.

“RAD has been the most positive experience I’ve had working with HUD,” states Richelle Patton, president of Collaborative Housing Solutions of Decatur, GA, a consulting firm that specializes in creative problem-solving to develop affordable rental housing. She specializes in HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration program, has been involved with around 18,000 RAD unit conversions and has served as a RAD transaction manager for HUD.