Joel Swerdlow Author Archives

ICAST’s IRA & BIL Instant Benefit Estimate Calculator is now available on NH&RA’s website under the Resources section.

A new kind of senior is on campus. As described by Andrew Carle, an assistant professor at George Mason University, in northern Virginia, and founder of the nation’s first Master of Science in Senior Housing Administration (MSHA) Program, this new senior—age 55 all the way up to anything—lives on or near campus; goes to class, theater performances and ballgames; wears school sweatshirts, and engages in activities like mentoring undergraduates. It is, Carle says, “the future of senior living.”

A depression-era factory turned affordable housing and a rehabilitated bank transformed into community event space are among the 16 winners and finalists of the 2016 J. Timothy Anderson Awards for Excellence in Historic Rehabilitation—fondly referred to as “The Timmys.”

WaterFire is a non-profit arts organization whose activities include simultaneously lighting nearly 100 bonfires suspended just above the rivers that run through downtown Providence—accompanied, according to founder and Executive Artistic Director Barnaby Evans, “by music and other art surprises” that bring “joy and energy” to the way people experience and explore the City.

Enterprise Community Partners, long a national leader in affordable housing, is two years into its transformative Health and Housing Initiative, and is now exploring the next housing-health frontier.

Alabama’s state legislature let its Historic Tax Credit (HTC) expire in May 2016, but the credit’s legislative opponents were telling colleagues it would be reinstated —with the same seven-year extension—later this year or in 2017.

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.

Improved profitability, reduced operating costs, increased building value, and high investment returns. That’s what every developer wants, and that’s what will be possible in New York state thanks to governor Andrew Cuomo, through the recently initiated $5 billion Clean Energy Fund (CEF).

The Woodlawn, a four-story, 18 unit, mixed use building in Portland Oregon, demonstrates how technological and design innovation fuel energy savings, which in turn bring tax credits and lower financial costs – and keep pushing communities into new, cost-saving terrain.

We have two options,” an official from the Housing Authority of Baltimore City (HABC) tells a meeting of several hundred people who live in an HABC-owned building.

In 1975, when then Mayor William Schaefer was concerned about Baltimore’s reputation, he gathered four local ad agencies who put their heads together and decided to solve the problem by giving the town the nickname, Charm City.

The large map shows the city of Baltimore broken into block clusters, color-coded to designate variables such as home ownership and occupancy rates.