Tax Credit Advisor Article Archives

The question is: Why would a successful, experienced developer that relatively easily could have raised the $7.2 million needed to build a mixed-use Opportunity Zone project in northwest Philadelphia from a small number of well-heeled investors, instead go for a complex financing structure involving investments as small as $500?

What is the future of affordable housing in America going to look like? Are we as a society going to have the will and as an industry going to have the means to significantly increase volume and accommodate everyone from the lowest incomes to the middle-income workforce?

Can the four percent and nine percent tax credits co-exist peacefully in the same housing project? At the Building 9 project in Sands Point, Seattle, Mercy Housing Northwest decided the two forms of credit could, as long as they were segregated into separate projects in the same development.

So powerful is the fear of the devil we don’t know that though everyone who works in affordable housing will admit privately that, as currently regulated, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) is broken in a policy sense, few will voice this publicly.

There is a shortage of good urbanism in America. There are only eight, “legacy cities,” where dense, transit-oriented neighborhoods spread contiguously over many square miles.

State housing finance agencies are still feeling their way into the new Income Averaging (IA) authority, with no clear consensus yet on standard practices for how it will be implemented.

In 2007, Laura Burns created an investment fund, Eagle Point Ventures, that acquired General Partnership (GP) interests in tax credit-financed projects and yielded strong returns for its investors.

These comments were offered by Steven E. Lawson, chairman of The Lawson Companies, on behalf of the National Association of Home Builders at a September 6 hearing of the Housing and Insurance Subcommittee of the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee.

As you have read in these pages, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 enacted a new incentive for community development, the Opportunity Zone Program found in Internal Revenue Code Sections 1400Z-1 and -2.

How do good ideas go from theory into political reality? This has become a pressing question for America’s YIMBY movement.