All Posts

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law this month, and the provision drawing the most attention is Title X, Section 1001, titled "Homes are for people, not corporations." It bars any for-profit entity that controls 350 or more single-family homes from buying additional ones, with civil penalties of the greater of $1 million per violation or three times the purchase price, routed to HUD for homeownership programs. The restriction takes effect roughly 180 days after en

HUD's latest Low-Income Housing Tax Credit tenant data, covering 2023, shows that 57.2% of LIHTC households with reported income earn 30% of area median or less. That is the highest share since HUD began collecting the data in 2015. Median tenant income in the program is $18,600, and nearly one in five households reports income under $10,000. The common read on LIHTC is that it serves the 50 to 60% AMI band and rarely reaches the lowest-income renters. The 2023 tenant data co

Kansas City is assembling a $100 million affordable housing fund with no public dollars in it. The Mid-America Regional Council and Greater Kansas City LISC plan to launch the Kansas City Regional Housing Fund once commitments reach $40 million, which LISC's Geoff Jolley anticipates by October. Roughly $12 million is secured from five foundations, with close to $60 million pending. At full size, organizers project 3,500 to 5,000 affordable units across a nine-county, two-stat

California voters will decide in November whether to authorize an $11.25 billion housing bond, after Governor Newsom signed SB 417, the Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act of 2026, on June 25. The measure pairs $10 billion in general obligation bonds for the construction, rehabilitation, acquisition, and preservation of affordable housing with $1.25 billion in self-supporting revenue bonds for the CalVet home loan program. The state estimates the bond will help more than

A 318-unit, two-property portfolio in Waco and Denton went to special servicing in April – not on rent softness or occupancy, but because a property tax exemption the loan was underwritten around failed to materialize. Per an April 24 Morningstar Credit report shared with Multifamily Dive, the failed exemption obligated the borrower to pay down principal to meet a 10.33% debt yield hurdle, and negotiations are underway to spread that paydown over time. It is at least the thir

New York City's Block by Block housing plan pairs an ambitious target with an unusually large capital number – roughly $22 billion across HPD and NYCHA over five years, about $4.4 billion a year, behind a goal of 200,000 newly built and 200,000 preserved affordable units over the next decade. The headline is the unit count, but the more telling figure is the production math underneath it. The plan funds a path to roughly 8,000 city-subsidized units per year through HPD and H

Seattle's voter-approved social housing developer is closing on its first building this month – Elara at the Market, a 150-unit complex in Belltown, for roughly $60 million. The program is funded by a 2025 ballot measure that taxes the city's largest employers (a 5% levy on compensation above $1 million), and it runs on a mixed-income model: half the units stay market-rate, half are reserved as affordable, with the higher rents helping carry the lower ones. More than 10,000 p

I spent seven years in the Boston area before leaving in 2021 – grad school in the city, then a few years running market-rate developments in Cambridge. Even then the affordability strain was hard to miss: long-term tenants priced out, and many of the developers I knew either rebuilding their businesses around affordable housing or leaving for the Carolinas, Tennessee, etc. At the time, I read it as a coastal-gateway story. Now that my work runs across eight states, I would

The Local Initiatives Support Corporation released a report last week, "The State of Affordable Housing," that reframes the affordability problem away from production and toward the operating line. The figure that anchors it: median per-unit property insurance on LIHTC-financed homes reached $697 in 2023, up from $286 in 2016, after six consecutive years of double-digit increases. LISC notes some owners have absorbed premium jumps as high as 300% without filing a claim. The

Multifamily Dive ran a piece last week on a question that sounds simple: are rent concessions rising or falling? The answer depends entirely on which number you look at. REIT executives reported free-rent incentives easing on their first-quarter calls, while CoStar, RealPage, and Yardi all show concession usage broadening across 2026. Per Colliers, concession dollars hit a record high in Q1 at an average of $129 per unit, yet only 25.4% of units are offering any incentive at

A city fund in Chattanooga recently put $8 million into a 170-unit project that no private backer wanted to touch. In exchange it took a 51% ownership stake and a requirement that 30% of the units rent below market. The fund's target return was about 8 percent, versus the roughly 16 percent a private equity shop would have demanded. That gap in required return is the mechanism the headline glosses over. The novel part isn't the concessionary return – CDFIs and mission lende

The House passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (H.R. 1299) on May 20 by a 396-13 vote. Press coverage has focused on the supply provisions and the corporate-landlord ownership limits. The package's most consequential capital-markets provision, however, is the Community Investment and Prosperity Act, which raises the cap on national banks' public welfare investments (PWI) from 15% to 20%. Per the Affordable Housing Tax Credit Coalition, the Housing Credit accounts for

NYC Comptroller Mark Levine launched the NYC Housing Investment Initiative on April 16, committing $4 billion in NYC pension capital to affordable housing finance over the next four years (i.e. roughly $1 billion per year). The commitment more than doubles the five public pension funds' current $2.8 billion housing exposure as of year-end 2025. The headline number drives the press coverage, but the structural changes underneath the first $1.25 billion of allocations are whe

Reps. Jimmy Panetta (D-CA) and Mike Carey (R-OH) reintroduced the Workforce Housing Tax Credit Act on May 6. The bipartisan bill would create the first federal middle-income housing tax credit and finance roughly 344,000 affordable rental homes over the next decade, per the sponsors' release. A 2023 attempt at the same legislation died in committee. The mechanics borrow heavily from the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. State housing finance agencies would receive an annual mi

The April new residential construction print is out, with total housing starts down 2.8% month-over-month to a 1.47 million annualized rate. The composition of that print is where the more interesting read sits. Single-family starts fell 9.0% to 930,000, and single-family permits dropped 2.6% for the second consecutive month. Multifamily starts (i.e. 5+ unit buildings) rose 14.3% month-over-month and 23.3% year-over-year to 529,000, a three-year high in the segment. Multifa