Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens is planning to launch a second affordable housing fund to help spur a more rapid increase in the supply of affordable housing, a senior city official said last week during Bisnow‘s Atlanta Multifamily Conference.
Bisnow/Jarred Schenke
LDG Development’s Rick Cunningham, Atlanta Housing’s Terri Lee and the city of Atlanta’s Courtney English at Bisnow’s Atlanta Multifamily Conference March 21.
“You will see us move to do another affordable housing fund in relatively short order,” Dickens senior adviser and Chief Policy Officer Courtney English said Thursday at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta. “We did $100M. It’ll be a lot larger this time to help meet the needs that these projects have as they come up.
“The mayor has a goal of building and preserving 20,000 units of affordable housing in eight years. That’s about a $7B problem. The overwhelming majority of that will be provided by the market, but that still leaves a significant gap that the public sector has to figure out.”
Last year, the Atlanta City Council passed a $100M bond for new affordable housing development and other incentives to help low-income renters. That funding is coupled with $100M in donation commitments from the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation and the Joseph B. Whitehead Foundation to the city and the nonprofit Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta.
The funding fueled the city’s affordable housing trust fund, now totaling $374M, which English said “is going to be deployed immediately to get housing out of the ground.”
“The more housing we build, the more prices go [down], and it’s good for…
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