Latest Updates
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How the Federal Financing Bank supports multifamily construction
The White House today announced a meaningful change to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Treasury’s Federal Financing Bank (FFB) Risk-sharing program. The change will give users of the program, developers and housing finance agencies, significantly more certainty around interest rates throughout the years-long development process. This increased cost certainty will allow…
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The bipartisan permitting bill gets transmission right
It has been a big few months for transmission. On the heels of FERC Order No 1920, which overhauled regional transmission planning, Senators Joe Manchin (I-WV) and John Barrasso (R-WY) released the text of their permitting reform legislation, the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 (EPR), in mid-July. (See the detailed and one-page summaries, as…
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Removing Barriers to On-Site Solar in Public Housing
Read the complete letter and memorandum. Center for Public Enterprise, in collaboration with Boston Housing Authority, New York City Housing Authority, New Bedford Housing Authority, MassNAHRO, Cambridge Housing Authority, and PowerOptions, recently sent a letter and memorandum to the Biden Administration detailing an issue that housing authorities face regarding on-site solar development. The recommendations accompanying…
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Chaining Explainer
How Tax Credit “Chaining” Expands the Reach of the IRA Through Greater Public Participation in Project Development Download this brief as a PDF here. The Department of Treasury is soliciting comments on final rules regarding tax credit chaining. Tax credit chaining allows public and nonprofit entities to purchase tax credits and monetize them through the…
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Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, Part 3: Public Options Support Public Finance
Entities seeded by the GGRF will have to change their strategy when governing the markets that they created: they will have to work to become public options that compete with and shape the behavior of other market participants. This is important not only because private investors may underbuild, but because they may deliver bad outcomes.…
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Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, Part 2: How to make a market
The EPA’s announcement of the first round of GGRF recipients marks the “end of the beginning.” For the past decade, the advocates of green banking have pushed for federal financial involvement in green lending. The GGRF is the first small step in this direction. GGRF recipients—coalitions of nonprofits, community development financial institutions (CDFIs), and state-chartered…
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In Conversation with HUD
Last month, Paul Williams joined the leadership team that created the mixed-income public development program at the Housing Opportunities Commission of Montgomery County to speak at HUD’s Quarterly Update, hosted at HUD’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., organized by their Policy Development & Research division.
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Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund: purposeful public financing for decarbonization
There has been over a decade of advocacy by the Coalition for Green Capital and others for green banks, alongside proposals for even more comprehensive infrastructure and public development banking options. As a watershed moment in public policy, this blog explores some of the theories behind why the GGRF, and the green bank model, is…
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Geothermal liftoff
This post is republished from the April 2024 installment of our Capacity Factor newsletter. Subscribe here. The Department of Energy (DOE) released another commercial liftoff report, this time focused on enhanced geothermal energy. While all of their reports are excellent, this one features a wonderful discussion of how the changing grid shapes the price of geothermal…
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Overreading into underwriting
If you’ve ever secured a mortgage, signed up for an insurance plan, or—anyone could be reading this—taken your company public on the New York Stock Exchange, then you’ve needed something called underwriting. Taking on debt to finance a home is risky, to say nothing of raising funding for a company. You know this, and so…