General News

On June 12 the Bipartsan Policy Center published a new brief entitled “Housing Assistance is a COVID-19 Response and Racial Justice Priority.”  The brief finds that the public health and economic crisis that COVID-19 triggered has put millions of low-income households at risk of eviction and homelessness and has widened racial disparities in housing and health outcomes.

Rural community leaders, employers, affordable housing providers, developers, lenders, planners, policy makers and residents are invited to learn more and provide final input prior to the launch of the competitive application process for the Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority’s rural affordable workforce housing pilot.

The California Housing Partnership recently launched its Housing Needs Dashboard, a new online data tool to discover and compare housing data for every California county and the state overall

On June 30, City Lab published an article on how developer Avalon Bay is converting a portion of the 41-year-old Alderwood Mall outside of Seattle into housing.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) focuses on rental housing from 2001 through 2017 and analyzes the share of households that rent, the affordability of rental housing and rental housing conditions. In 2017, almost 7 million more households rented their homes than in 2001, which brought the share of households that rent from an estimated 34 percent to 36 percent.

The ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing, in collaboration with RCLCO Real Estate Advisors, released a report looking at the changing demand dynamics for family rental housing, development typologies that are responding to this demand and barriers to family rental housing development. The report points out that renter families tend to have as many children as homeowners. And while renter families tend to require just as much space as families who own their homes, most new rental housing units are much smaller than similarly aged for-sale housing units

The California Housing Partnership published the 2020 Housing Need Reports for all of California’s 58 counties. The reports document the gap in affordable homes versus need and looks at costs that the lowest income renters face statewide and at the county-level. The reports make several statewide policy recommendations, including making permanent the $500 million annual […]

The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) and the Public and Affordable Housing Research Corporation (PAHRC) released a new report, 2020 Picture of Preservation, which estimates that nearly 300,000 may be lost from the nation’s affordable stock in the next five years.

The National Council of State Housing Agencies and Novogradac released a report examining the impact of lowering the 50 percent test for four percent LIHTC and tax-exempt bond financed properties and found that a lowered test could result in the financing of between 177,665 and 1,421,320 affordable homes over the next ten years.

Governor Gavin Newsom released a revised state budget for California, which maintains earlier commitments to funding $500 million in State LIHTCs in 2021. The proposal also includes $750 million in federal Coronavirus Relief Funds to acquire hotels and motels so that homeless individuals temporarily sheltered through Project Roomkey will have a place to live after […]

South Carolina enacted the Workforce and Senior Affordable Housing Act when House Bill 3998 was signed into law by Governor Henry McMaster (R) on May 14, 2020. The legislation allows for the allocation of state credits matching the federal credit allocation on both nine and four percent deals for deals placed in service between January […]

The ACTION Campaign, of which NH&RA is a steering committee member, sent a letter to congressional leadership calling for our Housing Credit priorities. The letter calls for enacting a minimum four percent LIHTC rate and lowering the 50 percent test for bond financed transactions.