Capital stack and soft money — Nebraska

NIFA doesn't run HOME or the National Housing Trust Fund — NDED does, through the same joint application

The 9% NIFA/NDED Application is a genuinely joint document. NIFA's own application inquiries page routes LIHTC/AHTC questions to NIFA's LIHTC Allocation Manager and HOME/HTF questions to a named contact at the Nebraska Department of Economic Development — two different agencies answering two halves of the same form. HOME and the National Housing Trust Fund (referred to throughout NIFA's materials as "HTF") are NDED programs; NIFA's role is limited to scoring the LIHTC/AHTC request and coordinating the joint submission, not administering the federal subsidy dollars themselves.

The application text is explicit about this division: HOME/HTF eligibility, activity compliance, and prior-project release-of-funds status are all listed under a section headed "APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS FOR HOME/HTF FUNDS (to be verified by Nebraska Department of Economic Development)" and are described as items that "do not need to be specifically addressed in the LIHTC application" because NDED verifies them independently against its own Annual Action Plan.

The application's own subsidy exhibit (Exhibit 107) makes the practical stakes explicit: if HOME/HTF funds are requested and not awarded, "the development will not be eligible for a Conditional Reservation of LIHTC/AHTC" unless an alternative funding-source commitment letter meeting the same requirements is already on file. And regardless of which source falls through, Section 5.3(d) of the Allocation Plan is a hard rule, not a scoring adjustment: "Any development for which a financing gap exists, (e.g., due to the non-award of another source of funding), that is greater than $500,000 will not be eligible for a Conditional Reservation." USDA Rural Development award letters sit alongside HOME and HTF in this same category — Section 12(e) of the Allocation Plan requires firm commitments for all three at the Conditional Reservation stage, with executed contracts due by the Carryover Allocation submission.

The Nebraska Affordable Housing Trust Fund: a real, separate state program this research could not confirm pairs with a NIFA award

Nebraska has run its own state Affordable Housing Trust Fund since 1996, under the Nebraska Affordable Housing Act. Neb. Rev. Stat. Section 58-703 states plainly: "The Affordable Housing Trust Fund is created. The fund shall receive money pursuant to section 76-903 and may include appropriations from the Legislature, transfers authorized by the Legislature, grants, private contributions, repayment of loans, and funds from all other sources." Section 76-903 ties the Fund to a share of the documentary stamp tax collected on Nebraska real estate transactions. The Fund is administered by the Nebraska Department of Economic Development (NDED) — the same agency that runs HOME and HTF — but through a wholly separate program: the Nebraska Affordable Housing Trust Fund (NAHTF).

Two things worth building into a Nebraska model rather than assuming: first, Section 58-703 itself sunsets the Legislature's ability to sweep money out of the Fund — "beginning on and after July 1, 2027, money shall not be transferred from the Affordable Housing Trust Fund" for purposes other than the Act's own affordable-housing uses — so the Fund's near-term balance and its post-2027 balance are governed by different rules. Second, this research could not confirm that NAHTF dollars can be layered directly into a NIFA 9% or 4% LIHTC capital stack the way HOME and HTF explicitly can through Exhibits 10-18. The standard 2026-27-28 9% Application contains no NAHTF-specific exhibit, and NDED's own NAHTF program materials describe a self-contained AmpliFund process aimed primarily at nonprofit-sponsored projects rather than a joint LIHTC submission. The one place "NAHTF" appears anywhere in NIFA's combined 2026/2027/2028 QAP package is inside the CRANE Program Application's Leverage and Collaboration scoring item, which names "NIFA & NDED funding sources included in [the] joint application (including HOME/HTF/NAHTF)" as resources that do not count toward that specific leverage score — language that at least confirms NIFA and NDED group NAHTF administratively with HOME and HTF for CRANE purposes, even though this research could not reconcile that CRANE-side description against the standalone 2026-27-28 9% Application's own Leverage and Collaboration item, which uses a different point scale entirely (see Pitfalls). Treat NAHTF as a real, sourceable state program to investigate for a Nebraska deal, but confirm its LIHTC-pairing mechanics directly with NDED rather than assuming it slots into the joint application the way HOME/HTF do.

Property tax beyond Section 77-1333: tax increment financing is Nebraska's other lever, and it collides with the restricted-rent valuation

Nebraska has no separate property-tax exemption or abatement program for affordable housing beyond the Section 77-1333 restricted-rent valuation already covered in Phase 11. What it does have is tax increment financing (TIF) under the Community Development Law, Neb. Rev. Stat. Sections 18-2101 to 18-2158 — a financing tool administered by a city or a community redevelopment authority (CRA), not by NIFA or the county assessor, and one that Nebraska's own statute makes explicitly available to LIHTC developments.

NIFA's own application materials treat TIF as an ordinary, recognized funding-source line rather than something exotic: Exhibit 107 (Subsidies/Public Funds) lists "TIF" alongside the Federal Home Loan Bank and local jurisdiction funds as an example subsidy source, and the Exhibit 111 Development Worksheets carry a dedicated "Tax Increment Financing" line in the sources-of-funds schedule.

The interaction this research flags for underwriting: TIF works by dividing the growth in assessed value (the "increment") above a frozen base year to pay debt service on a redevelopment note or bond. Section 77-1333 requires the county assessor to value a NIFA-approved Section 42 property using the income approach on its actual restricted rents, not comparable market-rate rents — which caps how large that increment can grow relative to the same construction cost on an unrestricted redevelopment project. A published Nebraska TIF redevelopment plan involving LIHTC units states this directly: because "properties subject to LIHTC will be assessed at lower valuations," the plan anticipated "a shortfall in TIF revenues" attributable specifically to the rent-restricted portion of the site. A Nebraska pro forma that sizes a TIF note off the same increment assumptions used for a market-rate comparable will overstate the note's supportable size on the LIHTC-restricted units.

The valuation mechanics behind that shortfall are also less settled than Phase 11's Woodside Place citation alone suggests. In A&P II, LLC v. Lancaster County Board of Equalization, 316 Neb. 216 (2024), the Nebraska Supreme Court confirmed that Section 77-1333's income-approach requirement is not absolute: a county board may petition the Tax Equalization and Review Commission (TERC) for permission to use "another professionally accepted mass appraisal technique" when the income approach appears inappropriate for a given property. The court dismissed that particular appeal as premature — TERC's grant of permission to use an alternative method, without yet specifying what that method was or what value it produced, was not a final, appealable order — but the decision confirms that a county assessor's departure from a straight income-approach valuation is a live, litigated possibility, not a settled formula. Any Nebraska pro forma carrying the restricted-rent valuation through the tax line for the full Affordability Period should treat both this case and the Woodside Place TERC decision together as evidence of a genuinely contested valuation question, not rely on either alone as the final word.

The AHTC's own pricing floor, and the fee caps that govern the rest of the stack

The Nebraska Affordable Housing Tax Credit (AHTC) is monetized through its own investor exhibit, and NIFA's application text sets a pricing floor on that exhibit that the federal credit's own investor exhibit does not carry.

The rest of the stack is bounded by a set of fee and allocation caps that determine how much of the development budget can be converted into deferred developer fee or other soft dollars in the first place.

Section 9.1(b) applies the 20% cap across an owner, developer, co-developer, sponsor, general partner, managing member, or any identity-of-interest affiliate for a given allocation year, and folds CRANE Program credits into the same ratio — a single sponsor cannot route around the cap by splitting an award between the Competitive and CRANE tracks. Section 9.2 layers the fee caps on top: NIFA states outright that it "may reduce the LIHTC and AHTC allocations to achieve the range of 24% limit," meaning a fee structure that clears an investor's or lender's own underwriting can still be trimmed back at the point NIFA sizes the credit request.