Redeveloping a Developed Nation

Seems like I got a lucky draw when I was born in the United States, the wealthiest nation in the world. I was fortunate to be alive for the final Apollo mission when Americans last set foot on the surface of the moon. As a kid, I watched the first Space Shuttle launch in 1981 and with 135 missions over 30 years, they hardly made the news anymore by the time I was an adult.

Growing up in a working-class neighborhood, I never gave a second thought to the quality of the roads where potholes were filled every spring, or the brand-new elementary school I attended as one of its first students. My mom was a single parent, but managed to earn enough to maintain a home for the family.

As I became an adult, I read about problems in other countries that I assumed would never happen here. Lack of clean water. Limited access to healthcare. No housing or food for large parts of the population. Those were problems in developing countries, and I knew I was lucky enough to be living in a developed nation where my problems were a bus running late, or the icemaker failing in my fridge.

But slowly, things have changed. Or maybe I’ve become more aware of what was there all along.

As a young reporter in 1997, I covered passage of the Children’s Health Insurance Program to help uninsured kids get access to proper medical care, leading to some 6 million additional children per year getting health insurance. Back in 2007, the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis collapsed. In 2014, residents of Flint, MI, discovered their drinking water was tainted after the city switched sources. And this summer, the news was focused on billionaires flying themselves into space rather than NASA astronauts.

And of course, we have millions of Americans who don’t have an affordable place to live – a problem that’s always been there and has been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Affordable housing is a priority for the Biden administration, and Congress has pumped billions of dollars into existing and new programs in the past several months. As my colleague Thom Amdur points out in his column this month, America is poised to take once-in-a-generation initiatives to provide more affordable housing than ever before.

It’s possible there may be more funding coming, depending on the on-again, off-again infrastructure bill winding its way through Congress. It’s unclear at press time if the wheels are going to fall off the infrastructure bus, but if it does you can be sure it will be back. To paraphrase 1984: It is infrastructure week. It has always been infrastructure week.

In this issue, we have lots of experts talking about all this funding and how it’s affecting financing in our industry. There is lots of new ground to cover in bonds, four percent deals, funding dedicated to historically underserved communities and much, much more. No matter your political stripes, the Biden mantra of “build back better” translates to some new and exciting opportunities. We’ll keep the discussion going and do our best to keep you up-to-speed on all the latest.

Paul Connolly
Executive Editor

Tax Credit Advisor welcomes reader comments. Contact the executive editor at pconnolly@dworbell.com.