Tax Credit Advisor Article Archives

Perhaps I’m biased, but my hometown of Charlottesville has to be one of America’s most beautiful areas. The 49,000-person city, which regularly makes lists of best places to live, is nice inside and out. Within the core are various World Heritage sites and quality public spaces that create a charming feel. This continues when driving out to the countryside, where lush farms and forests lead up into the Blue Ridge Mountains.

When the conversation turns to high cost, we wish it would go away. We are defensive, hesitant, technical and long-winded; modes of argument that make the industry look like complacent apologists for the status quo. Though our mode of argument hasn’t cost us yet, if we allow others to frame the debate, inevitably it will.

All developers have been through it – as new properties are designed and constructed, costs and budgets clash with project needs, wants and pie-in-the-sky wishes. As the design process progresses, a project takes shape that is closely trimmed by budget and time constraints.

YouthBuild’s origin story goes back to 1978, when Dorothy Stoneman, a Harvard-educated civil rights and community activist educator in East Harlem, surveyed the students with whom she worked, asking how they thought they could best improve their neighborhoods if they had some adult support.

We cannot deny we have a national housing crisis. A new study commissioned by the National Multifamily Housing Council recently found that the U.S. must add 325,000 new apartments annually to meet rising demand, while the average production over the past four years has only been 244,000 units per year.

“Longevity is going to change everything,” says Kathryn Lawler, executive director of the Atlanta Regional Collective for Health Improvement and one of the most popular presenters on the aging conference circuit.

I have enjoyed a long career in affordable housing development and have spent more than a decade working for Artspace, the nation’s largest nonprofit developer for artist housing.

New York City is undergoing the most audacious expansion of affordable housing in a generation, planning to add 200,000 units of new affordable housing over ten years. The idea came from Mayor Bill de Blasio, who announced his Housing New York plan after winning the election in 2014.

After more than a decade’s abandonment, a beloved Chicago landmark has come back to life.

New multifamily housing construction frequently includes a mix of market-rate apartments and low-income units.

Seattle, WA—The rise of micro apartments in urban America’s strongest real estate markets is often branded as a hot new trend. But really, it is a reenactment of the way U.S. cities have long worked.

In the early 1970s, the well-heeled residents of Aspen and Telluride, CO, faced a problem. Though they were often part-timers from the two coasts and other major cities who spent only weeks at a time in the two ski resort towns, their presence had priced out the very people they needed to run the towns and local businesses.