Deals, subsidies, gossip, taxes, and sneaky fine print in the world of rental real estate, from the editors and writers of Apartment Finance Today and Affordable Housing Finance magazines.
Tuesday, January 31, 2006
Tuesday miscellany -- HUDs and ends
HUD CPD's "HOMEfires" newsletter has new guidance on "Participating Jurisdictions' responsibilities for developing, disseminating, and implementing affirmative marketing procedures" affecting projects of five HOME-assisted units or more.
The new NLIHC Memo to Members among other things reports Sen. Shelby recently called the national flood insurance program "bankrupt." The Memo also offers a new Listserv for housing advocates but I'm getting error messages back from the posted registration address. Anyone else had success? [UPDATE: Seems to be working now.]
Apart from which, there's a HUD final rule on revisions to the FHA Credit Watch Termination Initiative, and a request for comment on
Also, there's a request for comment on the plans and reports required to be submitted by housing agencies that receive the special "Moving to Work" dispensations in their housing voucher programs. This one may be worth attention from a public records point of view, especially as some "Moving to Work" programs -- Atlanta's "CATALYST" especially -- have been criticized for evicting the unemployed.
A report from the HUD Office of Inspector General today recommends asking the Idaho Housing and Finance Association to return $3.8 million in multifamily housing funds to HUD. It also accuses IHFA of a conflict of interest, saying IHFA "holds substantial control" over a nonprofit housing owner, "The Housing Company" yet also monitors this entity on behalf of HUD.
In an extensive response published as part of the audit document, IHFA acknowledges $436,310 of "excess distributions" and agrees to look further into some payments out of replacement reserves, but contests most of the money allegations, attributing them mainly to a mistaken assumption by OIG that newer distribution limits would apply to some of the older projects. IHFA strongly contests the conflict-of-interest allegation, saying The Housing Company was formed in consultation with HUD, and with a 1990 Regional Chief Counsel opinion accepting the arrangement "for the time being" -- after which they got no HUD complaints on the subject until November 2004, which is when the audit began.
Possibly most important, they have a copy of the HUD memo by Deputy Assistant Secretary Milan Ozdinec that says the KDHAP housing relief program will be replaced Jan. 31 by a new "Disaster Supplemental Voucher Program." Not really any more details than before, but at least a little more context. Oddly, this memo seems to have been an official response to a particular inquirer -- Douglas Rice of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities -- and not a generally distributed notice. No idea when generally distributed notices will appear on this subject. [P.S. It looks like Mr. Ozdinec was responding to this Dec. 23, 2005 letter, in which nine advocacy groups asked HUD to extend evacuees' registration deadlines and to raise official "Fair Market Rent" amounts in the disaster-affected Gulf Coast.]
The NMHC people also have a facsimile of the different Jan. 20 FEMA memo that says at least some of the existing disaster relief housing contracts under Sec. 403 of the Stafford Act are to be continued until the aid recipients can be switched over to FEMA Individual Assistance under Sec. 408 of the Stafford Act.
Further from Donna's visit to the homelessness conference in Oakland:
Alameda County (Calif.) Supervisor Scott Haggerty knows how to put things in perspective.
He reported that the temperature in his house is set at a cool 56 degrees. Still, he said, there are some people living outside where the temperature is even chillier.
Haggerty, who spoke at the National Conference on Ending Family Homelessness in Oakland, Calif., said the median home price in his district is $700,000. At the other extreme, the homeless population in his area, he said, consists mostly of families.
The IRS has allowed three separate taxpayers extra time to post bonds in order to avoid increased tax after low-income housing tax credit properties changed hands. The announcements appear in three nearly identical Private Letter Rulings, which may not be cited as precedent: Nos. 200603007, 200604011, and 200604012.
More than 500 people have gathered in Oakland, Calif., for the National Conference on Ending Family Homelessness.
“All of us are thirsty to find new ideas and support,” said Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, the conference sponsor.
The big crowd, she said, was there to discuss strategies and share models for eliminating family homelessness.
While the challenges are great, there’s some good news on the homelessness front. Speakers pointed out that the McKinney-Vento homeless assistance program has enjoyed increased funding in recent years when other federal programs have been cut. In the last appropriations bill, Congress also called for research on family homelessness.
Still, not all the news is good. The conference was being held in the wake of the murder of one homeless man and the beatings of two others in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. A videotape of one of the beatings made the news.
Catching up with Roman at the conference, she pointed out that violence against the homeless isn’t uncommon.
The solution, she said, is for them to have housing.
- A good catch in yesterday's HAC News issue: "Katrina and Rita evacuees will no longer receive expedited placements in RD multifamily housing, but will be treated as regular applicants...." Scroll down to the fifth item in the list. The public announcement quoted is a Jan. 3, 2006 USDA Rural Development Unnumbered Letter, available beginning page 22 of this PDF.
- Today's Federal Register comment requests include the form -- No. 5884-A -- for a kindly little tax credit rewarding employers who kept their staff on the payroll while their businesses were inoperable due to Hurricane Katrina, Rita or Wilma.
- Also today, comments are requested on a planned "Customer Service and Satisfaction Survey of Public Housing Residents."
Commentaries on the FindLaw site this morning include an intensely angry column by a land-use attorney, Marci Hamilton, who sees unfair favoritism in the Religious Land Use and Insitutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) -- now apparently Public Law 106-274, codified as 42 USC 2000cc et seq. Amid Hamilton's indignation, and notwithstanding any personal solicitude readers may feel for the Establishment Clause, this actually looks like helpful news for builders of low-income housing where the projects face local snobbery and a religious charity is involved.
Just when you thought it was safe to apply for KDHAP...
...the National Low Income Housing Coalition hears HUD is about to replace its existing troubled hurricane housing relief program with the new "Disaster Supplemental Voucher Program." Well, the acronym looks even harder to pronounce, but the words suggest HUD is finally edging toward extra Sec. 8 vouchers -- the plan that quite a few housing advocates wanted to begin with.
- The California Board of Equalization is recodifying and revising its Rules of Practice. Possibly not of interest to many readers, but just in case, here's the Notice to Interested Parties... a "matrix" of comments and responses... and strikeout and clean copies of the proposed new regs.
Newly posted at HUDCLIPS 'What's New', we've got the first revision since 1997 to Community Planning and Development Handbook 1378.0, which spells out HUD's procedures for acquiring real property and for removing existing tenants from the said property in at least ostensible compliance with the Fifth Amendment. The handbook addresses both regular Uniform Relocation Act (URA) removals, and also the specially regulated HOPE VI relocation process. Most kinds of privately developed subsidized housing are potentially affected.
This new guidance is at a level of detail below the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), of which relevant provisions include 49 CFR Part 24. These CFR rules appear among transportation regulations because several agencies developed them cooperatively, and you can see how the Federal Highway Administration would get picked to head the drafting of rules on eminent domain. The new Handbook 1378.0 revisions say they incorporate the extensive changes to Part 24 published by the FHWA Jan. 4, 2005, together with corrections to same that appeared in the Federal Register May 2, 2005.
Handbook 1378.0 is easy enough to find online at the moment, but after it's superseded on the "What's New" list, you'll have to dig into the excessively complicated HUDCLIPS browse/search page. Within the "Handbooks and Notices" section, click the "Handbooks" circle on the "Community Planning and Development" row, then click "Search" on the right. In the resulting search screen, enter "1378.0" in the blank for "Document number." And don't forget the ".0" or the search result won't come up at all. Blippedy-blank creaky sclerotic databases over there. What HUD needs is to rent Google's whole staff for a month.
Approximately 5,000 hurricane victims have made their way to Arizona, according to Sheila Harris, director of the Arizona Department of Housing and executive director of the Arizona Housing Finance Authority. She says the evacuees may be staying because they have found wages are good in the state and the cost of living may not be much more than in the Gulf States.
Harris reports that overall, Arizona has become a more healthy market for both market-rate and low-income housing tax credit apartments.
She noted that her department has a director’s discretionary fund to help supplement projects. Developers who were awarded tax credits but find their projects coming up short on financing can come back and request additional credits. This fund is particularly important as construction material prices and other costs have increased.
Arizona, she said, is aggressive in trying to fund rural developments. Harris estimated that about half of the tax credit projects funded in 2005 were rural deals.
Valeri Pate, manager of the tax credit division at the Washington State Housing Finance Commission, said the deadline for tax credit applications in her state was Jan. 19. Washington officials are also trying to help rural projects, she said, and they made changes to assist these deals in the tax credit competition this year.
- The IRS has posted Publication 4492, its summary of tax relief measures resulting from the 2005 hurricanes.
- HUD Mortgagee Letter 2006-03 provides new guidance on "Refinancing of FHA Insured Multifamily Project Mortgages Pursuant to Section 223(a)(7)."
- HUD Public and Indian Housing Notice 2006-06 provides guidance to housing authorities on "Energy Performance Contracts" with terms up to 20 years, to be entered under the new Energy Policy Act of 2005 (Pub. Law 109-58).
- The law firm of Nixon Peabody suggests that the final and proposed Sec. 8 contract renewal regs HUD published on Jan. 12 "may be signaling a tightening of the use of budget-based calculation in reaching subsidy renewal amounts." Among other observations, the firm says "It is now completely clarified by these regulations that HUD has made the decision that as a legal matter a Section 524 renewal contract retains the right to be eligible for restructuring subsequent to its Initial Renewal. To our knowledge, this has been HUD policy, but now it is codified in Regulation." This and more in an "Affordable Housing Alert" distributed today by the firm. It doesn't seem to be posted on the firm's Web site yet but it might be worth checking back. Wait a few days and look in the affordable housing category under "Publications."
- HUD's Inspector General has posted new critical audits of the Prichard, Alabama housing authority and of two private companies in Florida and Wyoming that, like many others these past few years, have been accused of carelessness in screening single-family mortgages for FHA insurance.
- Last week HUD held a multifamily and health care loan sale. The official announcement emphasizes procedural changes that allowed more piecemeal bids on individual loans. Names of the buyers are listed.
Wow. Today HUD has published a large partial chunk, the "General Section," of the Super Notice of Funding Availability (SuperNOFA). The HUD press release is here, Federal Register text version here, Federal Register PDF version (24 pages) over here. This is pretty impressively early, considering that last year's SuperNOFA didn't appear until March 21. Today's publication doesn't specify actual deadlines yet, but it provides considerable other information that can help people start on the detail work in their applications before the main SuperNOFA announcement appears.
Someone at HUD seems to be making a real effort to involve SuperNOFA applicants as early as possible this year, as makes sense considering the number of 2005 application deadlines that had to be postponed due to technical glitches and complaints. It'd be interesting to know if the leadership for this within HUD comes from the Office of the Secretary or the Office of Administration. Back in December, HUD's Office of Administration invited potential grant applicants to register early for the electronic application process, which this year has become mandatory for all applicants except those seeking Continuum of Care funding or otherwise specifically exempted. In today's notice the contact for further information is the Office of Departmental Grants Management and Oversight, which is the division of the Office of Administration with responsibility for the SuperNOFA. Deputy Secretary Roy Bernardi is the signer of today's notice, but then he also signed the 2005 SuperNOFA, so maybe his participation is standard procedure for this type of announcement. It probably doesn't matter to most people whose idea it was to arrange this early start, but if anyone has heard where it came from within HUD, could you let us know?
HUD's Rural Housing Integrity Improvement Project, calls attention to Public and Indian Housing Notice 2005-37, a.k.a. Housing Notice 2005-21, which I'm embarrassed to have missed on HUDCLIPS in mid-December. It's an explanation of how to count, or not count, tenant income as affected by the new Medicare Part D prescription coverage.
Don't quite know how we missed this GAO report from mid-December finding 2% of public housing developments for elderly and disabled tenants to be "potentially severely distressed." Major problems in the developments identified included buildings not adapted for wheelchairs or scooters, and the perennial crime increases that follow from mixing older and younger tenants in the same buildings.
This is probably a single-family housing item, but it's included here if only as an interesting sidelight on the development business: HUD is requesting comment, by Feb. 21, on its system of Master Appraisal Reports, which are used to save appraisers time in developments that repeat similar house models.
Funny, they teach you as bedrock principle in law school that every parcel of land is to be treated as unique, and a specific parcel in a subdivision is formally as individual as Monticello. It's a lovely idea from a certain philosophical angle but I guess not everyone has time for it.
BizNewOrleans reports that tomorrow HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson will be opening "a national public service campaign designed to increase recognition and reporting of housing discrimination involving hurricane evacuees."
Administrators at public housing authorities (PHAs), and anyone else who works with the Sec. 8 voucher program, take a good look at Public and Indian Housing Notice 2006-5. This is an implementing notice for the 2006 HUD Appropriations Act (AKA the TT/HUD bill) and, among other announcements (some of which also mention available money), it says $45 million in extra housing voucher subsidy funding is available to PHAs where either the baseline information used to set the PHA's 2006 allocation was artificially low, or its costs increased unexpectedly. Any PHA folks who want part of the money have to send in an attached form request, by overnight mail with signature on delivery, to one David Vargas in Washington by January 31, 2006, which is the Tuesday after next. Looks like they won't accept or consider any new evidence in the requests: they'll only re-analyze existing data.
For some time HUD has been circulating online forms for comment under the Paperwork Reduction Act. Today the agency has taken what may be an original step farther: it has posted a notice in the Federal Register about a request for emergency OMB approval of a "logic model" for grant applications. (Comments are due Feb. 1.) This is interesting for a couple of reasons: first and most practically, it gives current grant recipients early warning of the "performance" questions they'll have to answer in future. Second, though, it shows HUD requesting comment on what seems to be an interactive process, not just a static form. This is interesting because whenever a bureaucratic process makes a transition to a new medium, the meanings of the old rules have to be reinterpreted. Fortunately, it looks like someone within HUD really does understand that the structures of computerized reporting systems have substantive effects at least as important as the phrasing of written forms.
Incidentally, gotta love the warm, caring phrasing in some of these "logic model" questions. Notably: "What happens to the 'subjects' as a result of the service?"
The "Pre-application Submission Log" for 2006 is posted on the main Texas Dept. of Housing and Community Affairs guidance page for low-income housing tax credit applicants. A chance to see, on the public record, who's looking for what this year in Texas affordable housing.
- NLIHC is awfully proud of the House Financial Services housing subcommittee for holding Katrina field hearings "at last." The new Memo to Members provides a summary of this past week's hearings in New Orleans and Gulfport and says Senate field hearings are on the way too. Also in the M2M: FEMA has again been ordered to extend hotel stays, this time to the end of January and in some places to March 1... FEMA has contracted with the United Methodist Committee on Relief for case management services to hurricane survivors... NLIHC discusses last week's project-based Sec. 8 rules... and a new study says that getting people into their own homes as soon as possible is a really good way to cure homelessness.
- GovExec looks at debate on whether the federal government should back up insurance companies' disaster coverage.
- Rent levels covered by the eviction freeze under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act have increased from $2400 to $2615.16.
- The Federal Housing Finance Board is requesting public comment on the process for gathering data on its "community support requirements," i.e. Community Reinvestment Act compliance and lending to first-time homebuyers.
- Last week the banking regulators expressed worry about institutions with high "concentrations" of commercial real estate lending, issuing a guidance document that told such institutions to take greater precautions against loss.
Vallejo, California is one of the inner-suburban towns where poor San Franciscans began to move in the '90s under the combined pressure of HOPE VI demolitions and dot-com-boom redevelopment. Now, with subsidy money tight, local officials there are pushing families on Sec. 8 to live in closer quarters: two to a bedroom regardless of age or gender, and "a living room is considered an acceptable sleeping area."
Yr humble blogmother recalls long-ago family car trips involving a highway route through snow-kissed Buffalo, New York. Thanks to the wealth of heavy industry in that fine municipality, the object was to hold one's breath as long as possible. It was never long enough.
No surprise, then, to read in this feature by a local alternative weekly that the city has no fewer than 20 Superfund sites, and hence a serious gold mine of brownfields redevelopment eligibility. The article takes brownfields funding as a departure point for an extensive cruise through Buffalo's lurid but lucrative history with the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
- A couple of weeks ago we mentioned we were researching a dispute over property tax exemptions at the California Board of Equalization. The AHF print-edition story, which includes links to Web sites with more detail, is now posted on our main page.
- HUD has a final rule and a proposed rule posted today on amendments to its procurement regulations. Comments on on the proposed rule are due March 14.
New Orleans rebuilding officials -- especially developer Joseph Canizaro, a member of the recovery commission -- were seriously unpopular at a public meeting yesterday, especially on the subject of a proposed four-month moratorium on building permits described as allowing city officials to first determine which destroyed areas are likely to be densely repopulated. The moratorium would appear to be really... seriously... unpopular.
HUD today has two separate items in the Federal Register on the renegotiation of expiring Sec. 8 subsidy contracts. First, a final rule that says it's specifically not about Mark-to-Market restructuring, and then a proposed rule with some added tenant protections and new material from recent legislation.
A federal appellate court today sided with the city of Fresno, city officials, and neighborhood activists who have been sued since 1997 by an unsuccessful developer who blamed them for sinking an affordable housing project called "Wellington Place." The short title of the case is Affordable Housing Development Corporation v. City of Fresno. The full official description takes up an exceptional 16 pages of case captions before the text of the opinion even begins.
It seems that back in 1996 the aforementioned Affordable Housing Development Corporation (AHDC) lined up a land purchase, affordable housing tax credits, a prospective tax-exempt bond deal, and a sale of the tax credits to Related Capital. However, after loud neighborhood opposition, the Fresno City Council refused to give its approval for the bonds under the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act (TEFRA). AHDC and its affiliate, Ashwood Construction, sued the city, the council members, and other opponents of the deal beginning in 1997, accusing them variously of "vicious, old-fashioned rabble-rousing," illegal housing discrimination, and breaking promises not to oppose the project -- among quite a few other things.
Today's opinion is by Judge John T. Noonan for a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He applies considerable pointed language to AHDC en route to upholding judgments against the company and ordering AHDC to pay both attorneys' fees and court costs to the private defendants, though not to the city itself.
This one is worth a read simply for the drama factor. It's practically a TV movie. And a quick Google on the subject suggests the background to the case is even hairier than the opinion makes it sound -- e.g. it looks like a right-wing activist law office, the Center for Individual Rights, came in on the side of the deal's opponents. Folks working on cases involving TEFRA may also find the case of practical importance. There's no story yet at the Fresno Bee, but they ought to have something posted by this time tomorrow.
The CDFI Coalition is spreading the word about the Wage and Benefit Metric, a new economic measurement tool currently being tested by the Northwest Area Foundation. The idea, apparently, is to measure just how much a given community development investment is doing for a local economy, and the guy to contact is Chris Allen via the Montana Community Development Corporation, and a version of the announcement is over here.
Just out, a "fact sheet" summary from the IRS about hurricane recovery tax relief and incentives under the new legislation. Taxpayers are advised to look for the new Publication 4492, to appear "by February 2006," which is to contain "a full explanation of the new laws."
Interesting just now from the Supreme Court: U.S. v. Georgia, a Scalia majority opinion with Stevens/Ginsburg concurrence, appears to slap down claims of state sovereign immunity so that a civil rights lawsuit can proceed under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. The context here is alleged mistreatment in prison, but this case may be worth the attention of housing managers because Title II is also applicable to housing operated by public entities.
Expert commentary to be noted later as it appears.
The comment period closed yesterday on a "question and answer" interpretive document proposed by three major banking agencies as guidance on their Aug. 2 rule for Community Reinvestment Act enforcement. The FDIC has already posted copies of the comments, including quite a few (can't tell if all) of yesterday's last-minute letters. As usual there's some boilerplate and repetition, but some of these comments are definitely worth a read. Knowledgable industry groups such as the National Association of Affordable Housing Lenders, the Independent Community Bankers of America, and the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (also here... and here... and here) do a helpful job of explaining the Q&A material in their critiques. These groups disagree pretty fundamentally on money questions, so together their comments provide an interesting preview of coming interpretation battles on the new CRA rules -- especially regarding incentives for disaster relief and the new intermediate examination category for banks between $250 million and $1 billion in assets.
The comment period is still open until April 4 on the separate EGRPRA request for comments on "Prompt Corrective Action" and "Disclosure and Reporting of CRA-Related Agreements." (See our previous note.)
Also at the FDIC today, the agency posted its first state and regional profiles showing the effects of the 2005 hurricanes on local economies and on banking.
There's a new Memo to Members posted this morning, beginning with the Congressional calendar: Senate resumes Jan. 18; House resumes Jan. 31; State of the Union address, evening of Jan. 31; White House '07 budget request, Feb. 6. Keep reading for much discussion of hurricane relief measures, especially at the Small Business Administration, which has seemed a little bit neglected in other coverage.
Sorry for light posting s'morning. Blogmother is on the road today. I did take a look at today's Federal Register and there's nothing to write home about. Not to housing people anyway. At HUDCLIPS they've got a new edition of a Sec. 202 disbursement requisition form, that's about all.
A newly posted IRS Private Letter Ruling (PLR) has found that the whole of a bond-funded building can still be a "qualified residential rental project" under Sec. 142 of the Code where one partnership owns the market-rate rental units, a different partnership owns the subsidized units, and the two types of units are "interspersed throughout the building." The PLR, which is No. 200601021, appeared publicly on Friday, Jan. 6, 2006 but was apparently written in December 2004 and issued in July 2005. There's no explanation for the mildly unusual delay before its public disclosure. As always, a PLR may not be cited as precedent.
What a phenomenal amount of hurry-up-and-wait it must take to get a HUD multifamily property management contract. A message emailed yesterday to the HUD contract opportunities mailing list -- and received on yr obd't blogmother's account only today -- announced a "Public Announcement of Performance Decision" on an available contract for "Multifamily Housing Rental Assistance Contract Administration for Programs Other Than Section 8." (Looks like the 2005 date on this page is a typo.) Anyone who wants a "debriefing" on the subject has to send an email to the proper official within three days of the notice. Since the announcement was made on a Friday, and there's no reference to "business days," that could mean interested parties have to send their emails by Monday on pain of not hearing the inside skinny on the contract. On the other hand, this contract has already been the subject of proposals for a "negotiated procurement" in a process that has been going on since April 2004 -- so presumably there's a population of interested parties who already know most of what to expect. Parsing further, it looks like the "performance decision" consists of determining the stages and durations for the contract, deciding to take the lowest "technically acceptable" bidder in each of eight regions to be served, and publicly announcing HUD's estimated cost to run the same buildings with its own staff.
Admittedly, this space mainly covers HUD in terms of grants and other subsidies rather than direct contracting, so comments would be extremely helpful from readers on the contracting side of things who are able to provide some more context. But, good grief, what an extremely specialized, sophisticated, high-level job it must be to get a contract providing such ordinary practical services to poor people in poor neighborhoods.
It looks like earlier this week FEMA extended the hotel stays of those poorest Hurricane Katrina evacuees. FEMA Answers notes the Houston Chronicle writeup.
Well, there's not much emphasis in this report on the possibility of reducing homelessness by providing more inexpensive places to live -- but, whaddaya whaddaya, the Urban Institute folks were just doing a study, not renegotiating the federal appropriations bill -- so don't blame 'em if all they came up with was advice on how to help without spending too much.
Lead author on this report is the Urban Institute's Martha Burt, one of the more distinguished homelessness experts around. It makes interesting and intermittently helpful reading. Some observers (such as the intended beneficiaries) might disagree with favorable mentions of the "Homeless Management Information Systems" registration and tracking program, but probably those couldn't be avoided in a HUD-commissioned report. And it's a little eyebrow-raising that the report treats homelessness as a disease and responds with tools out of epidemiology. Illness can be a dangerous metaphor in the wrong hands -- it can imply that homeless people suffer from personal defects rather than economic pressures. Here, though, it seems squarely understood that the idea is not to improve individual character, but to pull households back from the tops of slippery slopes with relatively small amounts of money and genuinely useful in-kind aid. Hey, it's worth a read as these things go. Though if you can spend the same time working or paying to prevent one eviction, probably better to do that instead.
A few months ago our publisher, Andre Shashaty, expressed some reservations over FHA Commissioner Brian Montgomery's qualifications. Our January AHF issue contains some follow-up research, and we've posted the public-record portion of his response to the Senate's application questionnaire, known as the Statement for Completion by Presidential Nominees.
Donna Kimura reports on our main page that Ms. Carrington is leaving her post as executive director of the Texas Dept. of Housing and Community Affairs to work for the private Reznick Group, opening a new office for them in Austin.
No, seriously. From Tax Credit Advisor via NH&RA, we have notes of a near-new National Park Service Preservation Brief discussing "The Use of Awnings on Historic Buildings: Repair, Replacement, and New Design." Not fascinating at first glance. Unless perhaps you've got an actual historic building to renovate and you're inclined to view the candy-striped rag over the porch as less "historic" than the more durable bricks and mortar adjacent. In which case this publication is for you. Another recent Preservation Brief addresses "The Preservation and Use of Historic Structure Reports." We're warned that the online versions of Preservation Briefs on these and other topics are a bit simplified, so maybe best send away for the print versions if you're planning to make practical use of the things -- but the online reports do come with substantial bibliographies so they may be worth a serious look.
Also via NH&RA: the Sierra Club has issued a report showcasing its favorite innovative development projects.
Quite fascinating: ABN AMRO Mortgage Group has agreed to pay $16.85 million and to refrain from submitting defaulted loan claims that would have cost the FHA a further $24.35 million. The allegations involved had to do with allegedly false certifications on some 28,000 loans that ABN AMRO underwrote. FHA had granted the company "direct endorsement authority," meaning the company itself had a lot of power to decide whether a loan qualified for FHA insurance or not.
The HUD Office of Inspector General has spent quite a lot of time in the past on allegations of sloppy or incomplete work by private companies that HUD was trusting to investigate whether individual home purchase loans were good risks for FHA insurance. Look up a phrase like "insurance endorsement" on the OIG audit search page and you'll see what I mean.
Your opportunity this week, should you choose to accept it, is to tell the federal banking regulators how to "reduce regulatory burden" under the headings of "Prompt Corrective Action" and "Disclosure and Reporting of [Community Reinvestment Act]-Related Agreements." This invitation to comment (by April 4, 2006) is the last in a series of topic-specific invitations required by the Economic Growth and Regulatory Paperwork Reduction Act of 1996.
Comments may be submitted at any of the four agencies that enforce the Community Reinvestment Act, or at a special site with the mellifluous name of www.EGRPRA.gov and a dandy logo with a scissors rampant snipping a red tape sinister. This newest request for comment isn't actually posted at www.EGRPRA.gov yet but presumably it will be soon.
Today, Jan. 3, HUD has just posted an online press release announcing the substantial 2006 increases in FHA maximum mortgage limits. This is major new information for the housing industry, of course, but only a few news outlets had noted the story as of this morning, even though HUDCLIPS had the announcement way back on Dec. 22. Now that there's a press release we can expect much more public reaction to the mortgage limit increases today. (So why on earth don't the housing reporters on major newspapers read HUDCLIPS 'What's New'?)
Today on HUDCLIPS, by the way, Public and Indian Housing has posted the much less exciting PIH Notice 2006-1, reinstating the existing Requirement for Designation ofPublic Housing Projects. (Aha: maybe the housing reporters on major newspapers find HUDCLIPS 'What's New' bores them silly?)
Overheard in Tucson, AZ in December: two painters working on the wall of an auto dealership saying that if work became less available locally they'd probably move to New Orleans.
Since there's no fresh federal nerditude to be had on this fine public holiday, this space recommends the year-in-review material at Curbed, which provides a fine cross-section of New York City real estate weirdness.
- HUD staff union AFGE 222 is protesting the agency's treatment of New Orleans employees: it says that, for fear of conflict of interest, HUD is refusing to provide housing assistance such as other federal employees in the area have received. The union contends, "...Almost all are without housing; some are facing eviction from FEMA hotels; others are struggling to care for sick and disabled family members; many of them are struggling with depression...."
