News

To encourage owners of multifamily properties to provide flexibilities to residents who may be struggling financially as a result of COVID-19, HUD has published a new brochure with updated guidance for multifamily property owners on promoting housing stability during the pandemic.

The New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) Coalition has published its latest annual progress report for the NMTC Program.   The 2019 survey findings show that program participants – from investors to community development organizations to the CDFI Fund – continue to improve and refine the program’s efficiency and impact in low-income communities.

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 divided Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) recently ruled in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), that restrictions on the removal of the CFPB director are unconstitutional. Under the law that created the CFPB, the director can be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” This decision will likely impact the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which has a similar structure as the CFPB and has a challenge pending in court related to its structure. The directors of the CFPB and the FHFA will likely no longer be independent regulatory agencies, but rather parts of any presidential administration that can be fired at will.

The House of Representatives passed the Emergency Housing Protections and Relief Act of 2020 (H.R. 7301) to provide relief for homeowners, renters, landlords and people experiencing homelessness amidst the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The provisions of this bill were largely included in the HEROES Act as passed by the House in May, which has yet to be voted on in the Senate.

In response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Internal Revenue Service today issued Notice 2020-53 to provide tax relief to issuers, operators, owners, and tenants of qualified low-income housing projects or qualified residential rental projects financed with exempt facility bonds, and state agencies that have jurisdiction over these projects.

The Internal Revenue Service issued a proposed rule on the compliance-monitoring duties of state agencies for purposes of the low-income housing credit. The proposed regulations relax the minimum compliance-monitoring sampling requirement for purposes of physical inspections and low-income certification review, providing flexibility and reduced burdens with respect to the requirements set forth in the final regulations published on February 26, 2019.

The House of Representatives voted along party lines to pass a resolution of disapproval to nullify the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s new rule on Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). The Congressional Review Act of 1996 gives Congress the power to rescind administration rules within 60 calendar days. The bill (H.J. Res 90) would need to be passed by the Senate (with a simple majority) and be signed by the President, both of which seem unlikely to happen.

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.