Case studies by the Urban Institute titled Anatomy of a Preservation Deal: Innovations in Preserving Affordable Housing from around the United States provide important lessons for preserving affordable housing and preventing its loss to expiring subsidies, deterioration, or redevelopment.
Five lessons from the case studies are the importance of: 1) state and local resources to match federal funding; 2) developer capacity to coordinate multiple funding streams and complete complex deals; 3) collaborative relationships between buyers and sellers; 4) a local policy context that facilitates preservation, such as the District of Columbia’s requirement that owners planning to sell their property provide tenants the opportunity to purchase their residences, or Massachusetts’s 40T expiring use preservation law that gives the state’s Department of Housing and Community Development an opportunity to match purchase offers when subsidized properties are for sale; and 5) policy networks to communicate preservation models, successes, and challenges to interested parties.
Anatomy of a Preservation Deal: Innovations in Preserving Affordable Housing from around the United States is available at: http://www.urban.org/preservation