General News

Standard & Poor’s has issued a new research report entitled “The U.S. Treasury’s New Issue Bond Program Offers Housing Finance Agencies Possible Increased Market Access.”

Florida Governor Charlie Crist recently singed into law a bill that makes a number of modifications to Florida’s New Markets Development Program (NMDP), a state-level companion program to the federal NMTC program that provides state tax credits for low-income community investments.

HUD has released its proposal to Congress for its Transformation of Rental Assistance (TRA) Program. The proposed legislation would authorize major changes to HUD’s rental assistance programs, aimed at rethinking the entire nature of rental assistance, making it more user-friendly, enabling more tenant mobility, facilitating more preservation and development.

The $350 million proposal would provide owners of public and HUD-assisted housing the opportunity to convert to Section 8 like property-based rental assistance contracts. This would provide owners an important new tool to sustain operations and leverage private financing to address long-term capital needs and implement energy-efficiency improvements. View the complete story for a section-by-section summary.

NH&RA is pleased to offer a CD-ROM containing digital audio recordings of select panel sessions from the Spring Forum.

Minnesota Housing announces the appointment of Marcia Kolb as Assistant Commissioner for Multifamily Business.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has announced that it has extended its deadline for public comment on the FY-2011 research agenda.

New York Governor David Paterson recently introduced a package of proposed legislative amendments to modify and extend the state’s rent laws for eight years, reduce the rate at which apartments become deregulated, provide additional protections for tenants, and address a recent Court of Appeals decision that resulted in uncertainty about the status of thousands of deregulated apartments.

Economists Donald Marron and Philip Swagel, recently published a new proposal for the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage finance giants that were placed into government conservatorship in 2008 during the housing market collapse.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) recently proposed a new rule that would establish a system for evaluating and rating the performance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in serving three specific underserved markets identified in the Housing and Economic Recovery Act (HERA) in 2008 ““ manufactured housing, affordable housing preservation, and rural markets.

HUD’s Office of Policy Research & Development has released a new information system containing labor force data for cities from a database of Local Area Unemployment Statistics data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Louisiana Housing Finance Agency (LHFA) has released a notice of ten frequently asked questions relating to LHFA’s 2010 RFP for market analysts.

The federal bank and thrift regulatory agencies have announced the availability of the 2010 list of distressed or underserved nonmetropolitan middle-income geographies where revitalization or stabilization activities will receive Community Reinvestment Act consideration as “community development.”