David A. Smith Author Archives

Home is where you choose

In today’s market, a dollar of tax-exempt volume cap that funds affordable housing is more than ten times more valuable than if it funds any other property type.

For just over a third of a century, Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies’ (JCHS) State of the Nation’s Housing has been an annual must-read for its comprehensive, omni-sourced examination of all things housing – and its disciplined just-the-facts-ma’am compilation makes it fertile ground for a guru to discover the invisible drivers of housing.

In early September, USC’s Lusk Center for Real Estate, in partnership with Habitat for Humanity’s Way Forward Housing Coalition, put on an in-person Washington, DC conference called “Housing’s Contribution to Economic Development.”

Without anyone noticing, at roughly the same time ‘return-to-office’ softened its branding to ‘hybrid work environment,’ ‘side hustle’ replaced ‘moonlighting’ as the common parlance for being entrepreneurial outside one’s primary job.

In 1937, an upstart 27-year-old British economist published a short essay whose modest title, The Nature of the Firm, has newfound resonance in our post-hybrid information work world.

Why so challenging? asked the housing joker and would not stay for an answer.

When the Ukrainians begin rebuilding their bludgeoned eastern cities and returning to their damaged homes, among the dysfunctional Soviet legacies they must address is a deeply embedded, invisible one: their national building code. 

Inflation being here in force regardless of our desires, last month’s Part 1 demonstrated that, when it comes to operations, your actions depend on what you think about the economic future.

Now that the Administration has tacitly acknowledged inflation is a major challenge by blaming it on others, affordable housing allocators, developers, owners, managers and regulators need to readjust their expectations and behaviors. 

Although virtue may be its own reward, try telling that to a nonprofit’s chief financial officer.

Because life makes sense only in retrospect, we’re seldom aware in the moment that someone else’s action can change our lives forever. Nor will your benefactor know, then or after, just how seminal his or her small action was, and somehow, you’ve never thanked those who helped you.