I work in CRE. Came across a landsite where the city designated this site as surplus land about 15 years ago. It's 90k square feet and the city has an exclusive

I work in CRE. Came across a landsite where the city designated this site as surplus land about 15 years ago. It's 90k square feet and the city has an exclusive agreement with an affordable non-profit to build maybe 40 units or so. I'm trying to negotiate something nextdoor and the owner has a 150 unit project almost approved with small, rent restricted units. It uses some density bonuses but it's a private funded deal. The lot is also 1/4th the size as the lot I described above, but 3x the number of housing units. Great right? Except it's over parked so with the restricted rents, it's going to be tough for a private developer to pencil it. What about an affordable housing developer, who can pursue LIHTC funding? Here's feedback from LIHTC developers: It's too many units. The only money right now is in special needs development (housing for homeless, people with mental illness)... way too many units where 50% of the building has to be people with problems in one property. LIHTC is funding smaller projects than this. 9% tax credits only pay up to a cap $2.5M or so in developer fees... so no incentive to do bigger projects. Plus, gov't funding means you have to build lots of "extra stuff" in the project... so you end up losing unit count and end up with bigger units and more non-residential space. I'm not in affordable, but ask anyone in the affordable space. It's complicated, messy, and incentives are all over the place, not always going in the 'right' direction due to how the reality of the ground is (i.e. affordable developers play the game of making development fees... not building the most amount of units (you get penalized)) Want people to solve the housing crisis? Make it easy and cheap to build. Affordable housing often times is more expensive than market rate housing, just so you know. There's a lot of B.S. added through the process.