Why affordable housing developers should go public : REITs as an alternative source of capital for housing development

Abstract

The affordable housing crisis in the United States is real and persistent. In the face of growing economic inequality and the failure of public housing programs, American cities need the development industry to deliver more affordable housing units than ever before. Instead, the affordable housing development process is regarded as a fragmented nexus involving multiple public and private sector parties. Raising capital for affordable housing projects is notoriously complex; it is common to see individual apartment buildings funded by a mix of any of the following: public grants, federal tax credits syndicated through private lenders, interest-free debt from community lenders and municipalities, mortgage debt from commercial lenders and private equity. A good affordable housing developer must be adept at understanding the covenants and eligibility requirements of every source of funds as part of the development process, and work with the myriad parties to compete or apply for funds. This long and convoluted process raises high barriers to entry into the industry and slows down the production of a public good. This thesis investigates the possibility of an alternative funding model for affordable housing development and proposes that developers go public to raise capital, adopting the same tried-and-tested method of financing real estate development that commercial developers have relied on for nearly 30 years. This thesis will argue that a REIT can function as an organizing mechanism to simplify the process of raising capital across different pools of institutional equity, private wealth and public funding. By being able to turn to the widest capital markets for fundraising, affordable housing developers can be nimble in choosing when to raise capital and flexible in deploying it to build experimental mixed-income and workforce housing, two typologies of housing that have been identified as helping to make urban areas more inclusive. Through this thesis, I posit that the affordable housing development REIT can serve as the central platform to consolidate the various pools of triple-bottom- line investors and to create for the first time a public market for an asset class that exhibits all the features of a stable, long term core investment.