40B Consultants MA

Development B

Assume Development B takes 9 months after the lottery to lease up their 60 affordable units. Here are some questions:

• After the lottery, they still have lots of vacancies. How soon after the lottery must they affirmatively marketing the availability?
• What would be considered sufficiently populated for a large 60 unit, highly desirable building that has less than 10% of unit turnover a year?
• The property has a large marketing budget. The required marketing while their waiting list is open is every quarter. As such. they might be more inclined to simply continually market rather than close their waiting list and deal with the nuances of reopening it. To avoid this, the guidelines state that the Waiting List must be closed once there are a certain amount of applicants on it. What should this maximum amount be? And from the date of the original lottery to the date that the max threshold is hit, can they just add applicants first-come first served?
• Once they have so many households on the waiting list that they must close it, how far can they deplete it before they have to reopen it (i.e. what would be the minimum amount of people on the Waiting List)?
• When they reopen the Waiting list, they market the opportunity and accept applications for 20 days. On the 20th day, they randomly pick the applications and add them to the bottom of the Waiting List in this random order. They add 14 applications using this process but they are still under the maximum threshold before they have to close the Waiting List. If they want to keep the waiting list open, they will have to keep affirmatively marketing. But while this new marketing is ongoing, can they add households to the Waiting List first-come, first-served, or must they continue to do this catch-and-hold-and-random-release process for as long as the Waiting List is reopened?

A final general Waiting List question to consider:

1. There are typically Waiting Lists for every unit size and type (disabled-accessible, adaptable, regular) in a development. When one Waiting List has insufficient households on it, does that mean that the leasing office must open all waiting lists and accept applications for all waiting lists or can they just advertise for the unit type that has insufficient waiting list applicants?
2. Measuring Progress Towards Local Goals

A.1. Affordability – Household Income and Assets (pg. 1)

The guidelines state that household income is defined by HUD at 24 C.F.R. 5.609. HUD’s definition is not 100% applicable to 40B as it allows for homeownership and also imputes income from assets that are part of an active business which is asset exclusion in these guidelines. In the last section of all these comments, I have asked a few questions on income deductions that are not addressed by the HUD guidelines. Clearly not all of these distinctions need to be addressed or clarified here, but I think at the very least the homeownership one should be addressed both here and in Appendix II.

Additionally, in this section you updated the time period that an applicant cannot divest him/herself of an asset for less than full and fair cash value to 2 years. In Appendix II, this period is still one year. These need to be reconciled.

This blog "40B Consultants MA" originally posted HERE.