RIHousing's own gap sources, a reorganized agency, and a tax credit that already sunset — Rhode Island

The QAP's own capital-stack scoring: a 60-point Financing category

Scoring/Point Allocation Summary, Section III.B of the 2026 QAP, puts 60 of the QAP's points into a single "Financing" category, split into four sub-parts: (A) Total Development Cost, worth up to 25 points on a weighted-average-per-unit calculation; (B) LIHTC efficiency (credit dollars per unit), worth up to 20 points; (C) leveraging committed rental and operating subsidy, worth up to 5 points; and (D) leveraging hard debt or other competitive housing resources, worth up to 10 points. Financing is the single largest scoring category in the QAP -- larger than Incomes/Populations Served (44 points), RI Workforce/Permitting (16 points), or Community (13 points) combined with any one of the others.

Part C is scored in three tiers by the share of units carrying committed operating subsidy (20% or more of units: 5 points; 10-19%: 3 points; up to 9%: 0 points). Part D scales by dollars leveraged per unit, from 2 points at $20,000/unit up to the full 10 points at $60,000/unit or more. Both parts reward money a developer brought in from outside RIHousing's own programs -- which is exactly why knowing who actually administers each of Rhode Island's own "internal" gap sources matters for how a pro forma gets built.

HOME and the National Housing Trust Fund: still RIHousing's own money, no separate agency

RIHousing's own program page states plainly: "RIHousing administers the HOME Investment Partnership Program (HOME) and Housing Trust Fund (HTF) as the State of Rhode Island's Participating Jurisdiction (PJ) to provide low-interest loans to encourage the construction or rehabilitation of affordable homes." Unlike the Housing Production Fund below, this administration did not move to the Executive Office of Housing in the 2025-2026 reorganization -- RIHousing remains the direct HUD grantee and program administrator for both.

The two programs target different depths of income: HOME rental proposals must serve households at or below 60% of area median income (80% AMI for HOME homeownership proposals), while HTF income targeting is deeper, serving households at or below 30% AMI. RIHousing's own 2026 QAP separately notes that HOME-financed and NAHASDA-financed projects qualify for 9% credit as "deeper targeting" under the federal rules -- a scoring-relevant detail for any project layering HOME funds under a 9% award. Funding round timing for both programs "varies" rather than following a fixed annual calendar, per RIHousing's own program materials; a developer needs to check RIHousing's current Program Bulletin postings for the live round rather than assume an annual date.

The QAP's own Tax Exempt Financing section (Section IV) is explicit that 4% Credits/Bonds deals are not scored under the 9% Financing criteria at all, and instead "will be scored for the other competitive sources developers may be seeking (e.g. HOME, Housing Production Fund, Building Homes RI, etc.)" -- meaning HOME and HTF commitments do double duty on a bond deal: they close the financing gap and they substitute for the 9% scoring a bond deal doesn't otherwise get.

The Housing Production Fund just changed hands

The Housing Production Fund (HPF) is a restricted receipt account created by R.I. Gen. Laws § 42-128-2.1. Its current text, as amended by P.L. 2025, ch. 278, art. 9, § 6 (effective June 29, 2025), states: "There is hereby established a restricted receipt account within the general fund of the state, to be known as the housing production fund. Funds from this account shall be administered by the executive office of housing." That 2025 amendment moved day-to-day statutory administration to the Executive Office of Housing (EOH) -- the same office that, effective January 1, 2026, also took over development of the QAP itself (R.I. Gen. Laws § 42-55-24.1), with RIHousing remaining "the sole and exclusive agent for the allocation of federal LIHTC credits" per EOH's own QAP webpage. In practice, RIHousing continues to run application processing and RFPs for HPF-funded rounds jointly with EOH -- but the statute's named administrator is now EOH, not RIHousing.

The fund's eligible uses are financial assistance -- "by loan, grant, or otherwise" -- for planning, production, or preservation of affordable housing for households at or below 80% AMI, plus technical and financial assistance to cities and towns for local housing production. In administering it, the statute requires EOH to "give priority to households either exiting homelessness or earning not more than thirty percent (30%) of area median income." The QAP's own Financing scoring (Part C above) references "HPF-ELI" as one of the named operating-subsidy programs a project can leverage for points -- confirming the fund still functions as an active gap source even as its statutory home changed.

This research could not independently confirm, from the statute's own text, the commonly repeated claim that the Housing Production Fund is capitalized specifically by real estate transfer/conveyance tax receipts -- § 42-128-2.1 itself describes only a restricted receipt account within the general fund and does not state its funding source. Treat that funding-mechanism detail as unconfirmed rather than assume it from secondary reporting.

Building Homes Rhode Island: a 2016 bond, a different commission, and not the same thing as the 2024 bond

"Building Homes Rhode Island" (BHRI) is the name of the specific bond program approved by Rhode Island voters on November 8, 2016, governed by 860-RICR-10-00-1 ("Rules and Regulations Governing the Building Homes Rhode Island Program") under the Rhode Island Housing Resources Commission -- a public corporation created by the state's own Housing Resources Act of 1998 (R.I. Gen. Laws Ch. 42-128), and a legally distinct body from RIHousing (the Rhode Island Housing and Mortgage Finance Corporation, chartered separately under R.I. Gen. Laws Ch. 42-55). The regulation defines "Rhode Island Housing" only narrowly, as the entity that approves BHRI's monitoring agents -- not as the program's administrator.

BHRI provides deferred and forgivable loans for rental development and forgivable loans for homeownership units, funded "subject to availability of funds" through Commission-issued RFPs. "Affordable" for BHRI purposes means a rent (including utilities) no higher than 30% of the monthly income of a family at 80% of median family income, or, for homeownership, a monthly cost no higher than 30% of income at 120% of median family income. At least 30% of BHRI funding must support Special Needs households (homeless, disabled, veteran, or elderly populations), and the BHRI-required term of affordability is at least 30 years, consistent with R.I. Gen. Laws § 45-53-3(5).

The much larger 2024 bond is a separate program under a separate name. Rhode Island voters approved $120,000,000 in general obligation bonds on November 5, 2024 as ballot Question 3, enacted as Article 5 of House Bill 7225 (the FY2025 state appropriations act). The official ballot title -- read directly rather than taken from a secondary summary -- allocates the money as: "a. Affordable Housing - $80,000,000 b. Acquisition and Revitalization - $10,000,000 c. Homeownership - $20,000,000 d. Site Acquisition - $5,000,000 e. Housing Related Infrastructure - $4,000,000 f. Municipal Planning - $1,000,000." Governor's office and RIHousing press materials describe RIHousing as administering most of the resulting programs (a $60-million-plus Consolidated RFP round and other disbursements have already been announced), which is a different administrative arrangement than BHRI's Housing Resources Commission structure. Because both bonds fund overlapping housing-production activity and "Building Homes Rhode Island" sometimes gets used loosely in press coverage for whichever bond is currently active, confirm which specific bond and which specific administering body backs any given funding commitment before counting on it in a pro forma.

Rhode Island's own State Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (SLIHTC): real, capped, and awarded twice already

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Act, R.I. Gen. Laws Ch. 44-71 (enacted P.L. 2023, ch. 79, art. 6, § 5, effective June 16, 2023), creates a genuine state tax credit layered on top of the federal 4%/9% LIHTC. Eligibility is gated on the federal award: an applicant "can only apply for a tax credit for a proposed project which is the subject of an application for or has or been approved for a federal low-income housing tax credit," per the implementing regulation, 310-RICR-10-10-1 § 1.6. The credit amount itself is capped project-by-project at the development's own "Financing Gap" -- defined as the part of total project cost left over after equity, debt, federal LIHTC, and every other reasonably available capital source have been counted.

Program-wide, § 44-71-4 caps SLIHTC hard: "The department shall not obligate Rhode Island low-income housing tax credits that cumulatively total in excess of thirty million dollars ($30,000,000) in any fiscal year." Credits are taken in five equal annual increments beginning the year the project is placed in service (§ 44-71-5(c)), unused amounts carry forward up to four additional years, and -- unusually for a state credit -- a taxpayer can skip the syndication market entirely and have the state redeem the credit directly: "Upon request of a taxpayer and subject to annual appropriation, the state shall redeem this credit, in whole or in part, for ninety percent (90%) of the value of the tax credit" (§ 44-71-5(e)). The program sunsets by its own terms: "No credits shall be authorized to be reserved pursuant to this chapter after June 30, 2028" (§ 44-71-12).

The statute's own definition section contains a genuine drafting wrinkle worth flagging rather than glossing over: "Department" is defined at § 44-71-3(3) as "the department of housing established pursuant to § 42-64.34-1[repealed]." That underlying enabling statute has since been repealed, presumably superseded by the Executive Office of Housing structure created effective January 1, 2026. In current practice, the Executive Office of Housing's own website lists the State Low-Income Housing Tax Credit among its own "Programs" and administers the competitive RFP -- so the program is functioning -- but a reader relying on Chapter 44-71's own cross-reference to identify the administering agency will hit a dead link in the statute itself.

The state historic tax credit: a real 20-25% gap source that is not currently open

Rhode Island's Historic Preservation Tax Credit, R.I. Gen. Laws Ch. 44-33.6 ("Historic Preservation Tax Credits 2013"), is a genuine, sizable rehabilitation credit: 20% of qualified rehabilitation expenditures, or 25% if at least 25% of the structure's rentable area (or the entire first floor) is made available for trade or business use for 60 months after being placed in service (§ 44-33.6-3(a)). The credit is capped at $5,000,000 per certified rehabilitation project -- a cap that applies across all phases if a building is rehabilitated in multiple phases -- and, at the program level, "the aggregate credits authorized to be reserved pursuant to this chapter shall not exceed sums estimated to be available in the historic preservation tax credit trust fund" (§ 44-33.6-3(c)-(d)). That trust fund is capitalized by the program's own non-refundable 3% processing fee on qualified rehabilitation expenditures (§ 44-33.6-4(d), § 44-33.6-10) rather than by a separate general appropriation -- a structural reason the credit has reportedly gone unfunded or fully reserved in some recent years even before its statutory sunset.

That sunset has already arrived. Section 44-33.6-11 states: "No credits shall be authorized to be reserved pursuant to this chapter on or after June 30, 2026, or upon the exhaustion of the maximum aggregate credits, whichever comes first." The section's amendment history runs through P.L. 2024, ch. 117 and shows no further amendment extending that date. A 2026 bill (S3151, with a House companion referred to in press coverage as H8404/H8408) would have extended the sunset to June 30, 2031 and raised the credit to as much as 35% of qualified expenditures for a multi-family project that includes affordable housing, while lowering the processing fee from 3% to 1% -- but S3151 passed only the Senate before the House failed to act on it prior to the 2026 session closing. As of this research, treat Rhode Island's state historic tax credit as unavailable for new reservations rather than as a live, standing gap source, pending confirmation of any later legislative action reviving it.

A taxpayer that elects and qualifies for this credit is separately barred from also claiming credits for the same structure's rehabilitation under R.I. Gen. Laws Title 44, Chapter 33.1, Title 42, Chapter 64.7, or Title 44, Chapter 31 (§ 44-33.6-6) -- so a developer weighing this credit against another state incentive for the same building needs to pick one, not stack them.

None of this status -- the sunset, the $5 million cap, the trust-fund-dependent aggregate ceiling, or the mutual-exclusivity rule -- appears anywhere in RIHousing's own QAP text. The QAP's only mention of the credit is the bare phrase "Federal and/or State Historic Credits" as one example of a qualifying "other competitive housing resource" under Financing Part D (see above). A developer counting on state historic credit dollars in a Rhode Island pro forma has to verify the credit's live status directly against Chapter 44-33.6 and the Historical Preservation & Heritage Commission's own current guidance, not against anything in the LIHTC QAP.

Property tax relief: two different local-option statutes, neither a RIHousing program

Rhode Island gives municipalities two separate, general (statewide) enabling statutes for reducing a LIHTC property's tax bill, and RIHousing is a party to neither. The broader tool, R.I. Gen. Laws § 44-3-9, lets a city or town's electors authorize their council, for up to 20 years, to exempt from taxation -- or set a stabilized tax amount for -- property that "has undergone environmental remediation, is historically preserved, or is used for affordable housing, manufacturing, commercial, or residential purposes," following public hearings with at least 10 days' newspaper notice and a council finding of local benefit. The narrower tool, § 44-3-13.4, lets a town or city council, by ordinance alone (no separate elector vote required by that section's own text), exempt from taxation -- in whole or in part -- real property "occupied by persons or families of low or moderate income," with the exemption term keyed to "the term of any mortgage granted by the Rhode Island housing and mortgage finance corporation on the real property."

Both statutes are purely local-option: a municipality decides whether to offer either one, on whatever terms its own ordinance sets, and RIHousing does not negotiate, approve, or administer either mechanism. What RIHousing does require, as a Threshold Criteria condition under Financial Feasibility, is documentation for mixed-income deals that the municipality has agreed to a specific tax-treatment benchmark: "the municipality has agreed to limit taxes on the affordable units to 8% of the gross scheduled rental income for the real estate tax calculation or lesser percentage determined by the municipality." That 8%-of-rent figure is RIHousing's own underwriting convention for how a locally negotiated PILOT or tax-stabilization agreement (under either § 44-3-9 or § 44-3-13.4) needs to be structured to satisfy Threshold -- it is not itself a separate statute, and it does not apply to the affordable units in every deal, only where RIHousing's Financial Feasibility review calls for it.