Virginia Housing Funds Affordable Housing Developments Using Modular Construction
Construction of Gateway Senior Apartments in Fishersville, Virginia Over the past decade, Virginia has been experiencing constant population growth. While this is positive news for the state, it also shines a light on the staggering need for more affordable housing. As of 2019, of the over 8.5 million people residing in Virginia, roughly 9.9% are estimated […]
It Could be a Busy Year for Affordable Housing Development
Despite the rising cost of land, labor and materials, more developers are finding the financing tools needed to build new affordable housing. “There is higher production in 2018 than 2017, thanks to a robust bond market—that has been driving a lot of activity,” says Peter Lawrence, director of public policy and government relations in the […]
New Regulations Say That Affordable Housing Is Fair Housing
A major Trump administration rewrite of the fair housing regulations that govern federal development grants is inching closer to completion. In late December, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sent Congress a proposed rule that would ask localities receiving federal housing funding to report on their housing market outcomes, and then propose […]
Banks Focus CRA Dollars on Affordable Housing
Banks provide more than $100 billion in capital each year to low and moderate-income communities as part of their Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) investing requirements. Increasingly, they are focusing those dollars on supporting affordable housing projects. “As a regulated institution, we are required for CRA purposes to make these types of community development investments, but […]
OPINION: Golf courses or affordable housing?
Despite all the public concern over the affordable housing crisis, and an alphabet soup of ballot and bond measures in recent years intended to address it, San Francisco has achieved limited concrete results. In September, the San Francisco Planning Department updated its “development pipeline”, which showed more than 2,000 individual development projects with some 73,502 new units […]
Progressive Voice: Innovation Needed to Solve Affordable Housing Crisis
As a 20+ year resident of Arlington and an affordable housing developer, I am often asked by neighbors, “What does affordable housing mean?” often followed by, “How can we help?” In stark terms, here’s an example of the “affordable”* housing situation. The average apartment rent in Arlington in 2018 was $1,918 per month.* Yet a […]
Amazon, Google, Apple seek fix for housing crisis they helped create
Affordable housing has become a crisis on the West Coast, due in large part to the expansion of the tech industry. Recently, the tech giants that helped create the problem have pledged money and support to seek fixes in their communities, but there’s plenty of reason for skepticism. Liz González, a contributor at Silicon Valley […]
