Mark Fogarty Author Archives

Renovating affordable housing units in San Francisco isn’t very affordable. Redoing the 202 units at Eastern Park Apartments, for instance, is estimated to cost $171 million when finished in this ultra-high-cost housing market.

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.

Most tax credit deals are complicated. Between the allocation, syndication and gap financing, Low Income Housing Tax Credit developments are never easy to finance and build.

Mercy Housing has a big footprint, with properties in 33 states and five regions of the country. The affordable housing nonprofit also has a big footprint in the lives of the occupants of those properties, with an extensive, diverse resident services effort that targets five different areas to make a big positive impact on their lives.

With CompassionCare, resident services are very much hands-on. You might see registered nurse Adam Sebek, for example, dash out of Park View Terrace Apartments to pick up an urgent prescription for one of the residents at the 120-unit property himself. The pharmacy isn’t far. It is in a mall right across the street from the Moorhead, MN affordable seniors/disabled development.

A small city, or even a small town, doesn’t have to have a small housing footprint. Cases in point: National City, CA, where a tiny staff works on big affordable projects, and Kittery, ME, a place so small it doesn’t have its own housing department but still dreams of attracting tax credit deals.

An idea that got its start at a kick-the-tires session about the future of Indianapolis four years ago has blossomed into an at least $15 million effort to enhance transit-oriented housing development (TOD) along that city’s expanding bus routes.

The urban violence that RYSE Commons is being designed to give its young members refuge from is very real. Some of its early members have not lived to see the Richmond, CA complex completed.

Talk about ambitious. Nashville’s Envision Cayce project is a big, dramatic effort to transform a neighborhood by building more than 2,000 new housing units and supporting facilities like a school, a health center and a pharmacy.

It’s not true that construction is the least digitized niche of the national economy. For instance, Keith Stacker told a recent meeting of top affordable housing executives, agriculture is less digitized than construction. And so is hunting.

Offsite construction is generating a lot of buzz on how it can transform affordable and workforce housing. But some are dreaming even bigger. Could OS create a totally private tax credit market, without the need for public money?