GUIDELINES FOR GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS

City and county officials who want to explore affordable rental housing for elderly and lower-income residents may find that working with a nonprofit housing development corporation like Corporate Fund for Housing (active in Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties) is a way to build affordable housing.

Here are some guidelines for officials:

Do you need such housing? If you have completed a recent housing element or housing market study, you have a good source of data on local needs.

If you have such local resources as surplus city land, community development block grant funds, tax increment funds from a redevelopment project, first-loss guarantees on a tax-exempt bond issue and/or would be willing to grant regulatory concessions to make a project feasible, you may be able to work with a nonprofit housing development corporation to produce an affordable housing project.

There are several government programs that facilitate working with local nonprofits. Among theses are the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, Nonprofit Tax Exempt Mortgage Revenue Bonds, the Section 8/202 program and California’s recently passed Propositions 77 and 84.

If you put local resources into an affordable project or grant a developer concessions on parking, zoning, etc. as a trade-off for affordable housing, you may be concerned with keeping your units affordable over time. If you have older projects that used HUD programs which have subsidies or mortgages that are expiring soon, nonprofit ownership may be the way to keep these units affordable, according to Fred Kahane of CFH.

For more information, contact Fred Kahane or Scott Kutner at the Corporate Fund for Housing, (213) 216-9333.