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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