Mark Fogarty Author Archives

There’s plenty of data to indicate Maryland’s Health Enterprise Zones (HEZ) have been successful in their goal of reducing health disparities for racial and ethnic minorities and reducing healthcare costs in the state.

A new certification not only indicates that an affordable housing owner/manager has a coordinated and robust resident services operation but also that it can help them qualify for an up to 30 basis point discount on a multifamily affordable housing loan from Fannie Mae.

Innovation in deals using both Low Income Housing Tax Credits and tax-exempt bonds can be seen in a pair of Washington, DC affordable housing projects that tapped the two funding sources for more than $80 million using a new master parity indenture program.

November’s state and municipal elections brought a big crop of newly-approved bonds into the affordable housing finance mix, with some of them passing by wide margins, and the biggest, in California, authorizing a whopping $4 billion in new money.

The traditional wisdom is that the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) and the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) operate in two separate arenas: housing for the LIHTC and business/commercial for the NMTC.

Projects, like the Salvation Army’s Freedom Center in Chicago, partially financed by New Markets Tax Credits, are changing the way people think about issues, like homelessness, substance abuse and the reintegration of prisoners into society.

Can the four percent and nine percent tax credits co-exist peacefully in the same housing project? At the Building 9 project in Sands Point, Seattle, Mercy Housing Northwest decided the two forms of credit could, as long as they were segregated into separate projects in the same development.

State housing finance agencies are still feeling their way into the new Income Averaging (IA) authority, with no clear consensus yet on standard practices for how it will be implemented.

Financing complex community development projects can take a lot of time and a whole lot of funding sources.

A $32 million renovation of an old courthouse in Lexington, KY, using both State and Federal Historic Tax Credits, has converted an 120-year-old structure into a beautiful multi-use boon to downtown redevelopment – and also righted a spectacular architectural fail from 50 years ago when a beautiful interior dome was sealed off and turned into an HVAC closet.

A new and disturbing trend in homelessness was taking over in Jacksonville, FL at the beginning of this decade.

Jeff Huggett enjoyed doing pro bono development work on a project to house the homeless in St. Paul, MN, recently.