Volume 4 Number 2
February 2007

In this Issue
What’s Happening to Assisted Multifamily Housing Properties?
Weighing Costs and Benefits of Major Housing Regulations
Innovation in Residential Construction
Effective CDBG Subrecipient Management
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• Rental assistance subsidies account for nearly all of HUD’s housing assistance outlays. Errors in subsidy determinations can occur in program administration, tenant misreporting, or subsidy payment billings. We’ll look at a new report that discusses significant advances in reducing errors through training, onsite monitoring, accessible information, and simplification of rules and requirements.

• The 2007 Difficult Development Areas (DDAs) and Qualified Census Tracts (QCTs) for the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (Section 42) of the Internal Revenue Service Code were published in September 2006. DDAs are metropolitan areas and nonmetropolitan counties with high land, construction, and utility costs relative to area median income (AMI). QCTs are census tracts in which 50 percent or more of the population have incomes below 60 percent of AMI, or the poverty rate is at least 25 percent. This brief article will examine changes in DDAs and QCTs from 2006 to 2007 and will direct people to the data sets available from HUD USER.

• HUD, with assistance from The National Trust for Historic Preservation, The Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers, The Enterprise Community Partners, Inc., and The National Center for Healthy Housing, undertook an investigation into the status and potential of housing rehabilitation for increasing the nation’s supply of affordable housing. We’ll explore present uses of LIHTC (low-income housing tax credits), HTC (historic tax credits), and NMTC (new markets tax credits), and how these tools might be used for housing rehabilitation.

• America’s housing stock is aging and in need of renewal, while the demand for affordable housing grows increasingly critical. We’ll visit Seattle, Washington, a community recognized for its robust market in rehab and adaptive reuse. The Seattle area experiences significant economic constraints and obstacles to development and construction of rehabilitated housing. Our article identifies these issues and discusses how Seattle is meeting these challenges.