By Michael A. Spotts
As summer (and vacation season) starts, it's easy for news and events to slip through the cracks. To bring everyone up to speed, here's a roundup of what Neighborhood Fundamentals has been doing over the last month:
On June 20, the Northern Virginia Affordable Housing Alliance (NVAHA) released research produced by Neighborhood Fundamentals on Northern Virginia’s Preservation Challenge: Trends, Threats, and Opportunities. If you are in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, please join NVAHA and the Coalition for Smarter Growth for a July 25 event and panel discussion on the report and its findings.
On June 29, Michelle Winters, Executive Director of the Alliance for Housing Solutions (AHS) and I offered public comments on Arlington County, VA's draft Capital Improvement Plan. The comments offer recommendations for using public land assets and facility co-location as a means of providing affordable housing in a land and capital-constrained environment.
On June 27, I joined Lisa Sturtevant and Ryan Price of Lisa Sturtevant & Associates and Ellen Harpel of Smart Incentives in participating in a panel discussion at the annual meeting of the American Planning Association Maryland Chapter. As the Smart Incentives blog post on our presentation details, we focused on the key question of: "How can local communities develop integrated land use, economic development, housing and transportation policies and plans to promote inclusive development and ensure that all residents benefit from growth?"
On June 7, I published a blog post that analyzed the effects of the 2017 federal tax law on efforts to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program.