David A. Smith Author Archives

You will never hear such a story about a Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) property, because of a fundamental difference in program structure. In appropriated programs, an evil owner can use the residents as economic human shields; in LIHTC and similar investment tax credits, the owner cannot.

George Bailey, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, surveyed his agency’s FY 2013 portfolio-level report. Across the board, results were dismal. With HUD alone bearing the burden of financing the development, renovation, and preservation of the nation’s entire supply of affordable housing, costs were rising; scandals abounded; and banks, investors, and states were unwilling to help.

As Heraclitus said, all things change – including properties. Not only is perpetuity in affordable housing unattainable, questing for it can be harmful.

Death should always be mourned, the more so when that death is of a loved and valued one which happened slowly, through inattention. So it is with as-of-right zoning, an aspect of development that over roughly three decades has softly and suddenly vanished away, taking with it our control over affordable housing costs and our ability to execute a national housing policy – and raising preservation from afterthought to national imperative.

Sometimes a revolution happens not with a blare of trumpets but through a thousand small actions in the same direction. Without actually sensing movement, one suddenly realizes the world has become quite different than it was – and is never going back.

Throughout my career, my affordable housing colleagues and I have avoided all mention of the Mortgage Interest Deduction (MID). Whatever we might have thought about it privately, in public our lips were sealed.

A hundred years ago, it was unremarkable to be born at home, and to die at home. Fifty years ago, it was unremarkable for a doctor to make house calls, and the equipment he brought was nothing more than a mysterious black bag, a stethoscope, a tongue depressor, and hands as cold as if he kept them permanently in a freezer.