The Year-15 Wave, Measured From the Public Record

2026-07-13

Issue #1 — DRAFT for review before sending.

Every year, tens of thousands of affordable apartments reach the moment their original capital structure was designed to end. The investor who bought fifteen years of tax credits wants out; the general partner needs new money for aging buildings; someone — a buyer, a lender, a state agency — has a decision to make.

The industry calls it year 15, and the remarkable thing is that the entire wave is visible in public data, years in advance, property by property. This newsletter exists to read that record out loud.

The wave, by the numbers

From HUD's LIHTC database (excluding the 11,000+ properties that have already left the program — an exclusion much published analysis skips):

• Roughly 84,000 low-income units in about 1,300 properties hit year 15 in 2024 — a figure that reconciles within ~3% of Novogradac's published estimate.
• The cohort stays between 60,000 and 100,000 units per year through the decade, an echo of allocation volumes fifteen years prior.
• Behind it comes the larger clock: close to half a million units in still-active properties reach the end of their extended-use period between 2020 and 2029.

Each of those units sits in a property with an owner, a management company, a subsidy stack, and — critically — a county whose public gap-funding posture will shape what recapitalization looks like there.

Why the exits matter as much as the events

In reconciling our counts against industry benchmarks, one filter proved decisive: HUD flags properties that are no longer in the program — qualified-contract exits, foreclosures, opt-outs. Counting them inflates the coming wave with events that legally cannot happen. More than 2,300 upcoming "capital events" in our own pipeline evaporated when we applied the flag. If you consume expiration data from any source, ask whether it did the same.

What's next

Weekly, in this space: the markets where events cluster, the jurisdictions whose HOME and CDBG balances are moving (or conspicuously not), the grants approaching their statutory cancellation dates, and the entities showing up as recipients of public money. All of it from filings anyone could read — assembled so you don't have to.

Methodology, source vintages, and our reconciliation against published figures are documented in the glossary and on each market page.