Chapter Adverse for Massachusetts Affordable Project
From HOUSINGFINANCE.COM, By Bendix Anderson: Bankruptcy protection is not the exclusive province of single-family detatched housing players, nor is it only striking down the once high-and-mighty profit-making organizations who populated home building.
The housing crisis, for what it is, is a leveler. Into its vortex is swept private and public, for-profit and not-for-profit, greed-fueled and virtue-inspired players alike.
If a local economy’s unhinged, it matters little that a condo project is pro-forma-ed for affordability vs. market rate. It will have too few takers nevertheless.
Affordable Housing Finance senior associate editor Bendix Anderson reports on one such case in Gloucester, Mass., where the wheels fell off an affordable project practically from the get-go.
The filing comes as no surprise to housing watchers. CAHO struggled for years to sell condominiums at its mixed-income Pond View Village property here, which started selling in August 2006, just as the condominium market began its collapse. See related article.
“The condo market softened, and we took our licks,” says Joe Flatley, executive director of Boston-based Massachusetts Housing Investment Corp. (MHIC), a major investor in Pond View.
CAHO planned to use the proceeds from the sale of 81 planned condos to help pay for millions of dollars of work the nonprofit did to prepare the long-vacant, historic LePage Glue factory for redevelopment, including 43 affordable rental apartments that are finished and fully occupied. Pond View was CAHO’s first development, though the local nonprofit was formed with help from Wellspring House, a respected Boston-based nonprofit affordable housing developer.
Housing’s crisis is not about the captains of home building who took pages out of Wall Street investment houses’ lessons in reckless avarice. It’s also about people who worked for decades to line up capital, entitlements, and community support to expand the housing stock for those with less wherewithal, and what’s happening to them as the economic corrects for its sins of profligacy.
Blogmania
They’re a pipeline for instant karma and on-demand insight. We think of them sort of as channeling the post-breakup Beatles. In the 1980s, you knew that Wall Street would supply the incisive, black-humor joke for just about any moment U.S. or world history could concoct. Today, that’s all happening on these guys’ blogs.
They’re Calculated Risk, The Big Picture, Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis, and The Mess that Greenspan Made.
It’s like, not everything they do lives up to their legend, but you still want to hear it all.
Consider their respective takes on, say, January. It seals their personae in our minds.
Calculated Risk is most like John–succinct, cynical, self-conscious, mirthful, prolific, prophetic.
Barry Ritholz’s The Big Picture reminds one of Paul–coyer-than-thou, emotive, rocking, self-referential.
George comes through in Mish–Virtuosic discipline, pseudo-mystical, whiny, didactic, earnest.
That leaves Ringo for Tim Iacono–Percussively repetitive, occasionally inspired, ironic but not skeptical, cheery.
Part of the best thing about them, like the Beatles, is their fan-clubs, the regular commentors. They’re like you and us–only maybe a little smarter, meaner, and more prepared to butt in line to have their say. Enjoy.
Co-inky Dink?
Wethinks, judging from the volume and quality of the catch in our overnight Akismet spam filters that Super Bowl weekend and Viagra sales must oddly connect.
Thoughts?
Seriously, though, the weekend after the Super Bowl traditionally launches what until 2006 was known as “Spring Selling Season” for home builders.
We know that many large builders, via their relationships with lenders or with their captive mortage divisions, are offering 4% or so 30-year-fixed mortgage packages to buyers. We also know that said home builders are fire-saling in certain communities to match price with foreclosure sales in those submarkets.
They’re saying that they’re 50-50 in spec vs. pre-order selling, which has to mean that there are buyers at the ready when the price and value line up right.
If people can buy a new home at a 2002 price, with 4% terms, could there be a Spring Selling Season after all? Maybe, in 2010.
First, people might need to stop worrying about whether they have a job or not.