Tax Credit Advisor Article Archives

The rapid escalation of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic is having a deeply unsettling impact on how we live and how we work. It is testing our disaster response system in unanticipated ways and will require a new kind of resilience from us.

“RAD has been the most positive experience I’ve had working with HUD,” states Richelle Patton, president of Collaborative Housing Solutions of Decatur, GA, a consulting firm that specializes in creative problem-solving to develop affordable rental housing. She specializes in HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration program, has been involved with around 18,000 RAD unit conversions and has served as a RAD transaction manager for HUD.

Sherrod Brown is a senior statesman who has devoted his entire adult life to politics—representing Ohio’s residents for 45 years—and become one of the most powerful lawmakers in the United States Congress.

It is a little counterintuitive to think of public housing, especially the big high rise towers whose problems have often been resolved by dynamiting them, as historic.

The Norris Homes project in Philadelphia has a little bit of everything. It is a Department of Housing and Urban Development Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) project. It is a Choice Neighborhoods Initiative. It uses Low Income Housing Tax Credits. It is a transit-oriented development (TOD). It is a green project. It even has a lender that provided both debt and equity for the financing.

Since its launch in 2011, the Rental Assistance Demonstration program (RAD) has put hundreds of  thousands of public housing units under private management, across 44 states plus DC. All this activity was spurred by HUD’s change in incentives – after decades of defunding public housing, HUD decided to allocate money for RAD, showing that privatization is the agency’s preferred future model. But RAD has also shot off because it’s being blended with other HUD tools that better enable public housing repair and conversion. Two of these tools are Section 18 and Rent Bundling. 

Many of today’s affordable housing policies, from inclusionary zoning to strengthened tenant protections, are—whether you agree with them or not—growing out of coastal urban America. But one relatively new HUD program, Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), has become a Southern thing.

Motivation is a basic actors’ tool – and it’s also the driving force behind the Actors Fund’s tireless effort to create the Hollywood Arts Collective: a new multi-use affordable housing development for all entertainment industry professionals being developed in Los Angeles.

When Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) was launched eight years ago, the public housing world was encased in its own hard shell: HUD officials speaking at NAHRO or CLPHA conferences to explain and cheerlead for the program were greeted with skepticism and suspicion only a skosh short of hostility.

As our staff prepares this issue to go to press, we are not working side by side in our downtown DC offices as we usually do but rather each teleworking from our own homes.