Practice Area Archives

Los Angeles Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA): Tenant Protection Study

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs selected HR&A to provide recommendations for a potential Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) policy for unincorporated areas in LA County, which aims to prevent displacement, preserve affordable housing, and increase homeownership opportunities for renters. HR&A developed a set of preliminary recommendations on program design and implementation strategies, including the required ecosystem, funding support, staffing costs, and data tracking needs.

The Department of Consumer and Business Affairs (DCBA) engaged the HR&A Advisors team, which included LISC LA and Change for Good Consulting. The team facilitated workshops with County stakeholders to discuss program goals and policy priorities, as well as external stakeholders, including tenant advocates, property owners, and real estate and affordable housing industry experts, to gather information and conduct desktop research and interviews with jurisdictions with precedent programs. Incorporating these inputs along with best practices, HR&A summarized a set of preliminary recommendations on program design and implementation strategies.

The final report provides a summary of the context and needs for a potential TOPA program, along with preliminary program design and implementation recommendations on how the policy could support tenant protection, anti-displacement, and expand ownership access for L.A. County unincorporated areas.

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Read the TOPA Report

Learn more about TOPA

Saint Paul, Minnesota Anti-Displacement Strategy

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

Facing housing affordability pressures, the City of Saint Paul engaged HR&A to develop an anti-displacement and community wealth-building strategy. HR&A provided the City with tools and strategies to mitigate displacement while supporting new development.

Since 2014, Saint Paul has undergone several transit improvements and redevelopment projects, which have sparked real estate investment pressures in surrounding communities and raised concerns about housing and commercial affordability. In response to these challenges, HR&A helped the City to develop an anti-displacement and community wealth-building strategy that simultaneously addressed the City’s need for new housing development and identified tools and strategies intended to minimize displacement risk for its existing residents and small businesses. The team identified changes in demographics, housing supply, housing demand, affordability, and small business presence over the last decade to assess displacement risks and trends citywide and in various Saint Paul neighborhoods.

Through engagement with a community advisory committee consisting of representatives of local businesses, community organizations, and local developers, HR&A was able to supplement its quantitative analysis with direct insights on the current housing and business challenges faced by residents across the city. HR&A used these findings to inform its review of potential tools and strategies that the City could deploy to mitigate displacement and tested the feasibility of those tools and strategies through financial analyses of prototypical developments.

As part of this work, HR&A analyzed the potential for an inclusionary zoning policy in the city, as well as the role the new citywide rent stabilization ordinance was playing in anti-displacement efforts. HR&A provided the City with an extensive list of recommended tools, policies, and strategies that could be deployed to mitigate displacement while still supporting new development and investments within Saint Paul.

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Explore HR&A’s Existing Conditions Report

Learn more about the work on St. Paul’s Anti-Displacement Plan and Community Wealth Building Technical Study website

Press

St. Paul looks for ways to curb displacement — Finance and Commerce

Photo: Mississippi River Walk – City House- Credit Visit Saint Paul

Charlotte Mecklenburg Housing and Homelessness Strategic Framework Implementation Plan

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

HR&A worked with United Way to develop an implementation plan for their initial strategic framework for a continuum of issues related to affordable housing and homelessness in Charlotte-Mecklenburg County. HR&A conducted extensive stakeholder outreach and analysis to create actionable and innovative strategies to reduce housing instability and homelessness across the region.

In addition to our extensive stakeholder outreach to understand the current institutional and programmatic landscape of homelessness and housing insecurity across the county, HR&A conducted an ecosystem scan of housing and homelessness services. This assessment not only identified gaps but also estimated the costs of filling the gaps. HR&A confirmed the findings through engagement with a broad technical committee that was made up of service providers, policy makers, affordable housing developers, and individuals with lived experience.

HR&A developed a detailed set of actionable and innovative implementation targets and a funding approach that supports the plan’s three main priorities: Person-Directed Care, Prevention, and Housing Supply. Person-Directed Care will help overcome a currently fragmented system of service provision that makes it difficult for people to connect to critical services. Prevention will build on highly successful existing programs to create a robust prevention system that helps people stay in their homes and avoid experiencing homelessness. Expanding the supply of affordable housing units will make all types of housing units — from shelter beds to single-family homes for sale — available to people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity. To move forward on these priorities, the plan calls for a new coalition of public, private, and nonprofit organizations to coordinate action and shift the broader policy environment.

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Read the Housing and Homelessness Strategic Framework Implementation Plan

Learn more about the the plan

Westchester County’s Housing Flex Fund

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

On behalf of Westchester County’s Department of Planning, HR&A Advisors designed and implemented a new $90M fund to allocate the County’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds. The Flex Fund is projected to support the development of approximately 1,500 new affordable homes across the county.

HR&A began with analyzing the County’s housing market conditions and evaluating existing affordable housing programs administered by the County, public housing authorities, local municipalities, and other public entities. HR&A conducted a series of interviews with key local and regional housing developers to understand their development pipelines and any barriers they felt obstructed the development of workforce and affordable housing development in the county. Based on a combination of these quantitative and qualitative findings, HR&A recommended the creation of a new two-year Housing Flex Fund, designed to meet the market’s short-term needs and strengthen the affordable housing system in the long-term.

In preparation for the project’s implementation phase, HR&A analyzed the financial proformas of 10 recently completed affordable housing deals and modeled 15 alternative funding scenarios to understand how the Housing Flex Fund could impact forthcoming housing deals — including Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and non-LIHTC deals alike. HR&A recommended an approval process that built on the strengths of existing funding processes while providing greater flexibility and an expedited funding timeline.

Working in close consultation with County staff, HR&A established an approval process and project scoring criteria. The scoring criteria and approval process ensure that the Housing Flex Fund will maximally achieve the County’s public policy goals. HR&A also supported the County in scoring all of the applications received and underwriting selected potential projects for investment.

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Learn more about the Housing Flex Fund on Westchester County’s website

Press

Westchester County launches Housing Flex Fund —NY Real Estate Journal

Westchester $100M program expected to increase new affordable housing units — Westfair Business Journal

Amazon Housing Equity Fund

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

HR&A is supporting program design and implementation for Amazon’s Housing Equity Fund, a $2 billion commitment to preserve existing housing and create inclusive housing developments through below-market loans and grants to developers, public agencies, and minority-led organizations. HR&A led negotiation and underwriting efforts for over 9,000 new affordable homes in the Washington DC area and will continue to support Amazon with their additional commitment of $1.4 billion.

HR&A Advisors has been working with Amazon since 2020 to help develop and implement the Amazon Housing Equity Fund, which was founded to help increase affordable housing opportunities in locations where Amazon has a significant presence. In cities like Washington D.C., Nashville, Austin, and Seattle, among others, we have helped Amazon address affordable housing shortages via subsidized loans, grants, and partnerships with local governments and nonprofits. Since helping design and then launch the program in January 2021, we have supported Amazon’s efforts to preserve 21,000+ homes and have underwritten and closed over $1B in housing transactions for the public sector and impact investors. A key tenant of the AHEF is also to provide access to capital for minority-led developers, resulting in 62% of these transactions supporting BIPOC-led developers. 

To develop a large-scale portfolio investment strategy for housing affordability, HR&A created an affordable housing finance summary of potential investment strategies, conducted a landscape analysis of peer investments in housing, worked with Amazon to refine investment goals and priorities, and developed a clear and concise financial framework to evaluate potential investment options. HR&A conducted an initial market scan in target geographies, assessed the housing need in those geographies to evaluate programmatic components, and conducted high-level financial analysis to test investment portfolio scenarios.

After the first phase leveraging Amazon’s initial $2 billion investment to preserve 21,000+ homes and positively impact 46,000+ residents, Amazon committed an additional $1.4 billion for a second phase.

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Check out the Amazon Housing Equity Fund’s website

Learn about Amazon’s second round of $1.4 billion in funding

2024 Amazon Housing Equity Fund Impact Report

Press

Q&A with Senthil Sankaran, Managing Principal, Amazon Housing Equity Fund — UrbanLand Magazine

Amazon Promised to Deliver Affordable Housing. How’s It Doing? — Bloomberg

Everything you need to know about Amazon’s Housing Equity Fund—a $3.6 billion commitment to help people access affordable housing — Amazon

Op-Ed: A Simple Housing Fix for Wake County —  INDYweek

Florida Apartment Association Housing Scarcity Dashboard

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

HR&A developed an interactive dashboard for the Florida Apartment Association to track Florida’s rapidly growing housing needs at the county and metro-area level and showcases cost drivers and benefits of incentive tools to highlight housing gaps for lower-income renters.

Visualizing the housing landscape across a state can be difficult — there are many factors that shape the housing ecosystem, and many are highly technical and often challenging to understand. The Housing Scarcity Dashboard helps demystify the technical factors that shape the housing landscape across Florida by integrating data and estimates from the Census Bureau, the Florida Office of Economic & Demographic Research, and other sources of high-quality demographic and real estate information into an easy-to-understand interactive heat maps and graphics.

In addition to current housing needs across income brackets, the tool also displays the projected future housing supply gap, emphasizing the detrimental ongoing impacts — especially for lower-income renters — that statewide housing shortages will have if left unchecked.

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Explore the Dashboard

Press

Florida Apartment Association launches website detailing housing scarcity across Florida — Florida Politics

San Diego Housing Commission Affordable Housing Preservation Study

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

Recognizing the opportunity the City has to invest in its existing housing stock to preserve affordability, the San Diego Housing Commission (SDHC) engaged HR&A and National Housing Trust (NHT) to create the Affordable Housing Preservation Study — a robust inventory and projections of San Diego’s existing affordable housing and a policy framework designed to preserve affordability.

With government subsidies to preserve existing affordable housing set to expire in the near future, SDHC needed our help understanding what naturally-affordable housing exists throughout the city in order to identify properties that could benefit from those programs. In response, HR&A developed a parcel-level inventory of all available subsidized and naturally affordable multifamily housing in San Diego.

To create this detailed inventory, HR&A developed a regression algorithm — using indicators like location, building age, size, and school district — that estimated the likelihood that parcel included naturally-affordable units. Based on this analysis, we developed typologies for the most common kinds of multifamily buildings with the most naturally-affordable units and mapped the city’s NOAH inventory. We then developed financial analyses for each of the typologies to estimate the subsidy required to preserve each unit.

The typology definitions informed the development of targeted policy recommendations for preservation, developed in collaboration with the National Housing Trust. The recommendation framework detailed policy tools, capacity-building, and financing sources to support preservation activities, as well as a review of nationwide best practices for preservation in comparable jurisdictions. SDHC will use these recommendations to form the basis of their preservation strategy for their general plan update and to guide policy in the coming year.

California Dream for All Program

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

HR&A helped designed a statewide shared appreciation revolving loan fund in California to provide down payment assistance for lower income borrowers by analyzing housing and homeownership trends across 10 regions in the state and set the potential lending parameters, resulting in over 2,000 new homeowners benefitting from the program.

HR&A was part of a team that designed a statewide shared appreciation revolving loan fund in California that would provide up to 17% down payment for lower income borrowers, helping make homeownership possible for borrowers who have traditionally been excluded in one of the most difficult housing markets in the country. We created a financial model of the potential program to test the impact of changes in home prices, distribution of loans across the state, and repayment rates. Then we adjusted our results based on feedback from local, regional and state-level stakeholders. This process helped us build support for the program and test local viability of the new lending product.

We supported our client, the State Treasurer’s Office, as they presented the concept across the state to advocate for initial funding for the program. Our final report laid out all the potential risks and options for various design decisions to provide a roadmap for future policy makers and program administrators. The California State Assembly provided an initial $300 million in funding to move the program forward in 2023 which resulted in 2,000 new homeowners across the state along with an additional $220 million in 2024. The program proved to be so popular that the initial funding in 2023 was exhausted within a few weeks of its public availability.

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Learn more about the program

Press

Just Days Left to Apply for California Program That Helps Pay for Your First House — KQED

City of Boston Downtown Office Conversion Study

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

HR&A supported the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA) in studying the feasibility of converting vacant downtown offices to residences through subsidies, tax incentives, and expedited permitting, which resulted in the City launching an office conversion pilot program. Since its launch in October 2023, the program has received applications proposing 400 new homes, and in 2024 the City extended the pilot with $15 million in new funding from the State.

This study is part of an ongoing effort by the City of Boston to generate strategies and initiatives that can revitalize Boston’s Downtown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Shifts in how we work, office space utilization and commuting patterns have resulted in lower tax revenue for the City of Boston as well as less foot traffic to support retail options and a safe and active street-level experience. HR&A analyzed potential new uses for vacant and underperforming office buildings, the costs associated with conversion, incentives for spurring conversions, and the impacts of repositioning office buildings on the city, its workers, residents, and visitors.

Based on our findings, HR&A recommended an actionable tax abatement to successfully convert vacant Downtown office spaces to viable uses. The project entailed data review and market analysis; building type inventory and reuse assessment; stakeholder interviews; financial analysis; funding strategies; and policy recommendations.

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Read the full Study

Learn about the Program

Mayor Wu Announces Extension of Office to Residential Conversion Program with Partnership From The State

Press

Converting Boston’s offices to housing is tricky, but it’s starting to happen — WBUR

Boston’s downtown office to residential conversion program gets $15M state boost — Boston Herald

Boston extends office-to-housing conversion program until 2025 — Axios

Why converting Boston’s empty offices to homes is harder than it looks — Axios

State of Maine Housing Study

November 20, 2024 / Comments Off

HR&A worked with the Maine Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation to develop a study to understand housing needs and deficits along with their impacts on Maine’s economy. Our study found that 76,400–84,300 new homes need to be built within the next 7 years to maintain Maine’s economic growth.

After the plan helped establish a deeper understanding of housing needs across the state, we launched a public data portal, which maps the housing crisis across the State to help highlight each region’s specific needs and measure progress toward the study’s recommended housing production goals.

HR&A engaged stakeholders through a Technical Working Group that provided input and feedback throughout the analysis. The study analyzed existing housing production gaps across the state and projected future housing needs based on job and population growth. We explored different regions across the State of Maine, and our Study functions as a municipal planning tool to support Maine’s LD 2003 legislation, which aims to reduce barriers to housing production across the state.

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Mills Administration and MaineHousing Announce Launch of New Statewide Housing Data Portal

Maine Housing Data Portal

Press

“This is how much new housing Maine needs to fix crisis” — Bangor Daily News

“Maine needs 84,000 new homes in the next 7 years, report finds” — Portland Press Herald

“Maine needs at least 84,000 new homes within seven years, study says” — Maine Public

 “Housing crisis worse than ever: New study calls for 80,000+ new homes in Maine” — 13 WGME