Joel Swerdlow Author Archives

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

Bright-colored images stenciled on walls await as you enter the Genesis community, a new affordable housing development in Washington, DC. These images exemplify what residents of the 27 affordable housing units define as community. Butterflies, birds, leaves, trees, stars and flowers—chosen to represent values like safety, trust, openness and togetherness— are interspersed with smiling images of the residents themselves.

“All our arts colonies,” says Kasey Burke, President of Meta, “integrate into affordable housing ongoing professional scale arts classes and amenities, which are completely free to residents. Programs are built for professional working artists, as well as nonprofessional artists who enjoy the ability to be creative and expressive.”

“The disparate impact decision,” says Josh Cohen, Development Director of Beacon Communities based in Boston, Massachusetts, “bolsters the notion that creating affordable housing in areas of opportunity can be a business opportunity for affordable housing developers.

Despite bipartisan appeal, NMTCs may be trapped in a strange new status quo in which such tax credits are routinely allowed to die, only to be revived—or not revived— while evidence of their success remains unchallenged.

The New Markets Tax Credit Extension Act of 2015

Hometown love endures? Yes. And contributes to significant accomplishments.

In early October, the Department of Housing & Urban Development awarded its 2015 Choice Neighborhood Initiative Implementation Grants to projects in five cities—Atlanta, Kansas City, Memphis, Milwaukee and Sacramento. NH&RA members were awardees as developers or funders in each of the cities.

You’re passing through a small town or city neighborhood and a building suddenly catches your eye. You see bracketed cornices and arched windows; everything looks stylish and solid, built back in an era when, as they say “people cared about quality.”

“New Markets Tax Credit legislation for South Carolina has been filed the past two years sponsored by a broadly bi-partisan group of legislators,” says Burnie Maybank, a former director of the state’s Department of Revenue and now in the Columbia, S.C. office of the Nexsen/Pruitt law firm

Throughout the U.S., people know new ideas and trends often come from California. But in one such case, some worry that the new ideas may drive developers and investors away from building affordable housing there.

”It would be paradoxical to construe the FHA [Fair Housing Act] to impose onerous costs on actors who encourage revitalizing dilapidated housing in the Nation’s cities merely because some other priority might seem preferable.”

The budget battle between Congress and the White House is heating up, and among possible casualties are two housing programs that seem to enjoy strong bipartisan support.