The work that decides
whether a building exists.

The American affordable housing industry has, over the past forty years, converged on a single dominant pre-development pathway: the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. Where LIHTC works, it works well. Where it does not, for projects too small, too unusual, too fast, or too mission-specific to fit the formula, sponsors are often left without a viable second route. The result is a system that produces a great deal of one kind of housing and very little of every other kind.

Our practice operates in the second category. We design pre-development sequences for projects that LIHTC cannot or will not finance: assembling capital from a wider palette, structuring partnerships that hold under stress, and shepherding deals from site control through capital close without losing months to the wrong banker or the wrong incentive program.

The work is unglamorous, sequential, and exacting. Done correctly, it is invisible by the time the building opens.

The tax credit was designed for a specific scale and a specific income band. Projects too small to amortize its transaction costs, too fast for its multi-year application cycle, or too narrowly targeted for its compliance framework simply do not get built within it. For many of the populations we serve, foster youth, refugees, and seniors at the edge of affordability, the gap between the LIHTC formula and the actual housing need is structural.

We have not, to date, used LIHTC in any project we have led. That is a deliberate choice, not an absence of capability. Every deal we have closed has been assembled from a wider palette of capital, including CRA equity, municipal soft funds, federal grants, sponsor capital, and mission-aligned debt, structured precisely because LIHTC was the wrong tool for what the project needed to be. How the non-LIHTC path works.