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The National Council of State Housing Agencies (NCSHA) recently sent comments to the IRS on how it can improve LIHTC disaster relief guidance provided in Revenue Procedures 2014-49 and 2014-50. NCSHA submitted a letter in response to the IRS’ request for comments in Notice 2019-52. Specifically, NCSHA urged the IRS to expand its disaster relief guidance to:

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) recently released a report finding that in 2018 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac met all their affordable housing goals and their obligations under the Duty-to-Serve Rule. The Duty-to-Serve program requires Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to facilitate a secondary market for mortgages on housing for very low-, low-, and moderate-income families in: Manufactured Housing, Affordable Housing Preservation, and Rural Housing.

Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic candidate for president and former U.S. Congressman from Texas, recently released a housing plan that aims to bring down rent by building six million housing units and rehabilitating existing public housing. According to his plan, low-income housing funded by LIHTCs wouldn’t be eligible to return to market rate after 15 or 30 years. Currently, investors get the tax credit while taxpayers subsidize construction of units that could ...

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) this week released the 2019–2020 priority guidance plan, which established guidance priorities for the Department of the Treasury and IRS for the period from July 1, 2019, through June 30, 2020. The priority guidance plan contains 203 guidance projects. As of Sept. 30, 2019, 31 guidance items have been released. In addition to the projects on the 2019–2020 plan, the Appendix lists routine o...

An affordable housing community in Tennessee catering to seniors and disabled residents became the first property financed by HUD’s Atlanta office under the new Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) Pilot Program. The site, designed for elderly and disabled renters, is in Marshall County, one of Tennessee’s designated Opportunity Zone census tracts. It’s supported by an allocation of 4 percent Low-Income Housing Tax Credits.

Maintaining the minimum set-aside and applicable fraction are a tax credit site manager’s two most important occupancy goals during the compliance period. But you must also be sure to find out whether the site owner made any extra promises to your state housing agency in return for its tax credit allocation.

The Washington State Housing Finance Commission (WSHFC) recently released a report on transfer disputes, titled “Nonprofit Transfer Disputes in the Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program: An Emerging Threat to Affordable Housing.” The report discusses the recent increase in the number of challenges that private firms have made on nonprofit partners’ project transfer rights in the affordable housing community, which the WSHFC asserts is detrimental to th...

In response to the devastation caused by the 2018 California wildfire season, the IRS recently issued a notice to the state committee that administers federal and state low-income housing tax credits to extend the date of its compliance review of credits in the three affected counties to either Nov. 25 or one year after the date of a building’s restoration and placement back into service. The relief is extended to California individuals affected by destructive wil...

The United States Census Bureau recently issued a set of three reports—Income and Poverty in the United States: 2018, Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2018, and The Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2018. The reports found that median household income held steady at $63,179 between 2017 and 2018. Social Security, refundable tax credits, housing subsidies, and other federal aid kept nearly 47.8 million people out of poverty. The number of people in pover...

Johns Hopkins University researchers recently issued a policy research brief exploring the effects of affordable housing on the cognitive development, physical health, and emotional well-being of children living in poverty. Though how much a family spent on housing had no effect on a child’s physical or social health, when it came to cognitive ability, it made a dramatic difference.