Mark Fogarty Author Archives

Rick Holliday and his colleagues at Factory_OS aren’t very ambitious. They just want to change the way housing is built in this country.

In Newport, RI, where it often seems easier to park a yacht than a car, you can, and if it is a property dating back to the nineteenth century you can use Historic Tax Credits along with Low Income Housing Tax Credits to help preserve it for its elderly residents.

Piggybacking, layering multiple tax credit awards or other financing sources to make a project work, is a technique familiar to every developer of, and investor in, affordable housing.

Affordable housing developer/owners have something in common when it comes to preserving project affordability: a common problem.

Martha Kegel remembers the intense six-month campaign to end veteran homelessness in New Orleans as “building the plane while we were flying it.”

An alternative way to estimate utility allowances (UA) in Florida is producing lower UA amounts for affordable housing managers – in some cases considerably lower.

Investors have different takes on what to do at Year 15 and Year 30 of Low Income Housing Tax Credit deals, and it isn’t quite as simple as the divide between mission-driven and financially-driven backers.

As MassHousing works to commit the balance of a literally groundbreaking $100 million project to create workforce housing, the agency is already planning for its Workforce Housing Initiative 2.0.

Income averaging can be a considerable help in increasing the number of workforce housing units available to those who don’t qualify for subsidies and cannot afford market rates.

There are some affordable housing projects that aren’t supposed to be bond deals, that are done far from the urban sweet spots the industry associates them with. But bonds can work in rural and “in between” areas, too, although the deals may become a little more hands-on.

When tax-exempt bonds fund an affordable housing project instead of nine percent Low Income Housing Tax Credits, state tax credits can be a real dealmaker.

There’s no question that the 40 buildings in the Betances Portfolio in the Bronx borough of New York City can benefit from substantial rehabilitation. After all, the earliest of these Betances multifamily properties was constructed in 1906.