- President Obama recently signed the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act into law. The legislation contains numerous provisions related to housing including, “pay for success” housing demonstration in which private contractors will enter into contracts to upgrade the efficacy of federal housing, and be compensated based on the effectiveness of their work.
- The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has proposed a new rule aimed at combating gender discrimination in the provision of housing services. Among other things, Equal Access to Housing in HUD Programs, Regardless of Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity prohibits inquiries into the gender and sexual status of tenants by housing providers.
Tag Archives: affordable housing
Preserving Workforce Housing
The Urban Land Institute has issued Preserving Multifamily Workforce and Affordable Housing: New Approaches for Investing in a Vital National Asset. Stockton Williams, the Executive Director of the ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing, opens the report with a Letter from the Author,
Real estate investors seeking competitive returns increasingly view lower- and middle-income apartments as an attractive target for repositioning to serve higher-income households. In response, creative approaches are emerging for preserving the affordability of this critical asset class for its current residents and those of similar means—while still delivering financial returns to investors.
This report from the ULI Terwilliger Center for Housing provides a broad-based overview of this rapidly evolving landscape. It profiles 16 leading efforts to preserve multifamily workforce and affordable housing, including below-market debt funds, private equity vehicles, and real estate investment trusts.
Collectively, the entities leading these efforts have raised or plan to raise more than $3 billion and have acquired, rehabilitated, and developed nearly 60,000 housing units for lower- and middle-income renters, with thousands of additional units in the pipeline. Several are actively raising more capital to expand their activities. They are meeting a pressing social need while delivering cash-on-cash returns to equity investors ranging from 6 to 12 percent.
The report is written with the following primary audiences in mind:
■ Developers and owners looking for new sources of capital to acquire, rehabilitate, and develop multifamily workforce and affordable properties;
■ Local officials and community leaders seeking options for attracting or creating new sources of financing to meet their rising rental housing needs for lower- and middle-income families; and
■ Real estate investors and lenders interested in more fully understanding their range of options for a product type that offers financial as well as social returns.
As the country continues to grapple with the worst housing crisis for lower- and middle-income renters it has ever known, the private sector and community-based institutions must play an ever-greater role in ensuring that existing affordable properties remain available to the many who need them, while doing what they can to produce new units where possible. The financing vehicles profiled here show what is possible and suggest opportunities for further progress. (iv)
I found Part II particularly useful, with its overview of financing vehicles. Many readers of this blog will benefit from a description of below-market debt funds, private equity vehicles and real estate investment trusts, particularly as they are illustrated with real world examples like the Bay Area Transit-Oriented Affordable Housing Fund, Avanath Capital Management and the Community Development Trust.
Tuesday’s Regulatory & Legislative Round-Up
- The Department of Housing and Urban Development has released a notice to the Federal Register to announce the Designated Difficult Development Areas and Qualified Census Tracks for purposes of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, which become effective July 1st 2016. This is the firs time that the Department has used Small Area Market Rents (SAMRs) as opposed to Metropolitan Area Market Rents for designation of Difficult Development Areas. The use of SMARs will allow a more granular assessment of rent differences within Metropolitan areas.
- Representatives Blum and Aguilar sent a letter, signed by 34 members of the U.S. House of Representatives urging Congress to act quickly to extend the 2014 Tax Extenders Legislation. Enterprise Community Partners Blog details how this extension would affect the Low Income Housing Tax Credit and the New Market Tax Credit, which have been utilized successfully by developers of affordable housing.
Affordable New York
I just came back from a great couple of exhibits at the Museum of the City of New York that would be of great interest to the readers of this blog. The first, Affordable New York: A Housing Legacy, provides a history and education of affordable housing programs that have been integral to the development of the City:
New York City has a long history of creating below-market housing for its residents. Today the city offers subsidized housing to families across a wide economic spectrum; more than 400,000 in public housing, and many more in privately or cooperatively owned apartments. With affordable housing a cornerstone of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, New York’s housing legacy—often overlooked and little understood—is more relevant than ever.
Affordable New York traces over a century of affordable housing activism, documenting the ways in which reformers, policy makers, and activists have fought to transform their city. A focus on current and future housing initiatives demonstrates how New Yorkers continue to promote subsidized housing as a way to achieve diversity, neighborhood stability, and social justice.
The exhibit has a lot of good pictures that give a sense of the range of options that exist for affordable housing development. It also provides a condensed history of the NYC experience with subsidized housing.
The other exhibit, Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half, is a bit more somber, but when viewed in the context of the first it shows the great progress we have made in providing decent housing to a broader range of City residents:
Jacob Riis (1849-1914) was a pioneering newspaper reporter and social reformer in New York at the turn of the 20th century. His then-novel idea of using photographs of the city’s slums to illustrate the plight of impoverished residents established Riis as forerunner of modern photojournalism. Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York’s Other Half features photographs by Riis and his contemporaries, as well as his handwritten journals and personal correspondence.
This is the first major retrospective of Riis’s photographic work in the U.S. since the City Museum’s seminal 1947 exhibition, The Battle with the Slum, and for the first time unites his photographs and his archive, which belongs to the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library.
The pictures of the homeless kids are heartbreaking — Newsies without the songs — and the recreation of one of Riis’ public talks is pretty extraordinary. The shows are running for a few more months, so there is still plenty of time to see them.
NINYBY
A propos of yesterday’s post on the great paradox of housing policy — people say that they want restrictive land use policies which limit the construction of new housing at the same time that they say that they want more affordable housing in their communities — I present Exhibit 1: Votes by Community Boards Running Strongly Against de Blasio Affordable Housing Proposals. This document provides evidence that people are strongly opposed to affordable housing in their own communities while bemoaning the lack of affordable housing in nearby communities. This state of affairs is so extreme that it deserves its own acronym, Not in New Yorkers Backyards, or NINYBY.
This document was produced by New York Law School’s CityLand periodical and it discusses a
comprehensive chart tracking every vote taken by community boards citywide on the ZQA and MIH text amendments. On September 21, 2015, the City Planning Commission referred for public review the Zoning for Quality and Affordability (ZQA) and Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) citywide text amendments. Since the public review process has begun, community boards across the city have met to discuss and vote on each of the two proposals. All 59 New York City Community Boards have until November 30th to vote on two citywide text amendments.
CityLand has created a comprehensive citywide chart that is tracking every community board action taken on ZQA and MIH.
* * *
Thus far, an overwhelming number of community boards have voted against both of these proposals, with MIH doing marginally better than ZQA. Within the boards themselves, the votes have been lopsided, with several recording unanimous votes against. Most Boards have backed up the votes with statements expressing their reasons for opposition. Some Boards that approved the measures included stipulations to the Yes votes.
New York City is never going to even begin to address its affordable housing issue if it does not implement policies like these proposed by the de Blasio Administration. Those who oppose these policies should at least admit that much is true.
Tuesday’s Regulatory & Legislative Round-Up
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has released its Rulemaking Agenda for Fall 2015, included is an estimate that the new mortgage servicing rules, proposed in November 2014, are estimated to be finalized by June 2016.
- The Chairman of the White House Counsel of Economic Advisers, Jason Furman, delivered a speech at the Urban Institute, entitled Barriers to Shared Growth: The Case of Land Use Regulation and Economic Rents in which he argues that land use restrictions such as tough zoning regulation exacerbate inequality and stifle development.
- New York City Mayor de Blasio has recently announced plans to spend $3 billion on supportive housing development for the homeless and victims of domestic violence.
Promoting Opportunity with Development
Enterprise Community Partners have posted Promoting Opportunity Through Equitable Transit-Oriented Development (eTOD): Barriers to Success and Best Practices for Implementation. It opens,
Development patterns directly relate to a community’s strength. Individual families, the local economy, municipal governments and the environment all benefit when well-located housing, jobs and other necessary resources are connected by efficient transportation and infrastructure networks. Equitable transit-oriented development (eTOD) is an important approach to facilitating these connections. This paper defines eTOD as compact, often mixed-use development with multi-modal access to jobs, neighborhood-serving stores and other amenities that also serves the needs of low- and moderate-income people. The preservation and creation of dedicated affordable housing is a primary approach to eTOD, which can ensure that high-opportunity neighborhoods are open to people from all walks of life. eTOD supports the achievement of multiple cross-sector goals, including regional economic growth, enhanced mobility and access, efficient municipal and transportation network operations, improved public health, and decreased cost of living.
Yet it is sometimes difficult for planning agencies, local governments, transit agencies, housing organizations, private developers, and other institutions that influence development to act in concert to overcome barriers to eTOD. Each stakeholder has a unique mission with disparate goals and compliance burdens and must comply with complex and sometimes contradictory rules and regulations. However, improving coordination between these sectors can shift a potentially adversarial relationship into a symbiotic partnership. As the public resources that support transportation and infrastructure networks and housing affordability remain threatened, such efficient coordination is an especially important goal. (5, references omitted)
eTOD has a lot going for it: it’s environmentally responsible, it’s socially responsible, it can promote nice development. It is a shame that it is so hard to pull off. It would be great if HUD could take the lead in promoting eTOD, perhaps in tandem with its recent fair housing initiatives.
