General News

Democratic presidential hopeful Mayor Pete Buttigieg (South Bend, IN) released An Economic Agenda for American Families which includes spending $430 billion on affordable housing measures. “He will enable more than 2 million more units of affordable housing to be built or restored where it is needed most, using billions of dollars of investments in the Housing Trust Fund, Capital Magnet Fund, HOME and CDBG funds, and the Low Income Housing Tax Credit.”

Voters in multiple jurisdictions across the country approved housing- and mitigation-related ballot measures. Voters in Durham, NC approved a $95 million affordable housing bond by a 76 to 24 percent margin. The measure will be paired with $65 million in federal and local funding over the next five years to support affordable housing development and […]

Daniel McCue with the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies argues in a new blog post that even the largest cities will need help tackling housing affordability.

Apple recently announced a $2.5 billion plan to help address the housing availability and affordability crisis in California. The funding commitment to California is expected to take approximately two years to be fully utilized depending on the availability of projects. Capital returned to Apple will be reinvested in future projects over the next five years.

Facebook announced a $1 billion commitment over the next decade to help address the affordable housing crisis in California, which will go toward creating up to 20,000 new housing units to help essential workers such as teachers, nurses and first responders live closer to the communities that rely on them.

The MIT Sloan School of Management recently announced the appointment of Edward L. Golding as executive director and senior lecturer at the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy (GCFP). Golding, a former head of the Federal Housing Administration, will help lead the GCFP in its mission to support governments in their role as financial […]

HUD released an evaluation of its Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), which finds significant evidence that RAD is stimulating billions of dollars in capital investment, improving living conditions for low-income residents and enhancing the financial health of these critical affordable housing resources. The report says that the 956 RAD conversions studied leveraged $9.66 for every dollar provided through HUD’s public housing programs, that all rehabilitation projects covered their rehabilitation needs, that there is an 87 percent post-conversion decrease in unscheduled capital needs for completed RAD properties and that tenants were pleased with the improvement.

A new working paper from Jacob Cosman and Luis Quintero of the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University cites concentration of developers as a reason for the dearth of affordable housing. From 2006 to 2015, the number of builders who controlled 90 percent of a typical market dropped by a quarter, which has cost the country approximately 150,000 additional homes a year and decreased the annual value of housing production nationwide by $106 billion — all else being equal.

A new report in Health Affairs examines whether expansions of Medicaid can prevent evictions from occurring. Early Medicaid expansion in California was associated with a reduction in the number of evictions, with 24.5 fewer evictions per month in each county from a pre-expansion average of 224.7.

Energy Efficiency for All (EEFA) released two new reports to provide industry experts and contractors the information needed to help make healthier building materials the easier choice. The first study by Elevate Energy provides a case study on the Energy Performance of Chicago Properties Retrofit With Fiberglass Insulation. The second study by Three3 examines Drivers, Adoptability and Performance of Healthier Energy-Efficiency Retrofit Materials in Affordable Multifamily Housing.

The Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University released a new report, Housing America’s Older Adults 2019, as a supplement to its State of Nation’s Housing Report. The report finds housing inequality is becoming increasingly evident among older Americans as the number of older households climbs to unprecedented levels.

Former Representative Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) released his presidential housing plan, which calls for creating 3 million new homes through the National Housing Trust Fund; creating 3 million new homes through a $60 billion investment in the Capital Magnet Fund and investing $50 billion to rehab public housing; fully fund Housing Choice Vouchers. If elected president, […]