Tax Credit Advisor Article Archives

“A whole lot of moving parts,” is the way Holly Bray of Love Funding in Washington, D.C., depicts the three-year process of rehabilitating Arnold Gardens, a three-building affordable housing project in suburban Suitland, Maryland.

The Historic Tax Credit industry has never been better organized than it is today—and that’s a good thing since there has never been a greater need for that organization than over the past few years.

Imagine that you woke up one morning, expecting to see the person whom you married 14 years ago lying in bed beside you and instead you found a brand new spouse.

On March 24, Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington launched a national effort to increase affordable housing tax credits by issuing a report entitled, “Addressing the Challenges of Affordable Housing and Homelessness: Housing Tax Credit.”

HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration program (RAD) has the potential to preserve thousands of units of much needed affordable housing as well as to improve the quality of apartments built, in many cases, half a century ago. That’s all great. But it also will, by necessity, cause some disruption along the way. In many cases, the amount of work needed in these units is going to require tenants relocating while the work is in progress.

The problem is clear, pervasive, and all but overwhelming: According to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates, there is a backlog of more than $26 billion in needed renovations, repairs and upgrades to the nation’s inventory of public housing properties, and 10,000 affordable units are leaving housing programs each year.

When soliloquized by megalomaniacal president Frank Underwood in House of Cards, our title quote sought to prove his opponents’ hypocrisy. But it actually reveals quite the opposite: a profound divide between two philosophies that affects almost every part of the affordable housing business.

Oxford Mills give educators a place where they can live, work and come together as a community. The mixed-use project includes apartments targeted to teachers. It also includes commercial space targeted to nonprofit educational organizations and community space – including a busy café and coffee shop – where educators can meet and share ideas.

In April 2015, Brian Swanton got a message from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Federal officials questioned whether his plan to redevelop public housing in Maricopa County, Ariz., would violate the Fair Housing law by concentrating poverty in a low-income neighborhood.

For the eight years since the onset of the financial crisis, the economic recovery in the United States has been uneven. Month-to-month we have enjoyed a slow, but steady increase, in the creation of new jobs into the economy, though critics correctly point out that many of these new jobs are not equal replacements for high-paying manufacturing jobs that have migrated overseas. Many real estate markets (and not just on the coasts) are booming, cap rates continue to shrink and the value of rental housing assets (market rate and subsidized) are at all-time highs.

Attendance at this year’s annual meeting of the National Housing & Rehabilitation Association at the Breakers in Palm Beach was a record high for the 34 year-old organization. Along with Henry Flagler’s beach palace, an aggressive level of development activity and the chance to network with industry luminaries, I have to think one of the lures was an entire day’s symposium devoted to the progress of the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program.

The idea for 409 Cumberland in Portland, Maine, one of the “greenest” and most innovative recent concepts in affordable housing, began in an Irish restaurant-bar.