Site sourcing and screening — Massachusetts

Which document is actually current, and what changed underneath it

The Commonwealth's LIHTC allocating agency is the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities (EOHLC), created when Governor Maura Healey used the state's Article 87 reorganization process to elevate the former Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) to a cabinet-level secretariat; Secretary Edward M. Augustus, Jr. was sworn in on June 1, 2023. Confusingly, EOHLC's own Qualified Allocation Plan refers to the agency as "HLC" throughout its text, not "EOHLC" -- both forms appear on the agency's own web pages, and older regulatory text (760 CMR 56.00, the Chapter 40B comprehensive-permit regulations) still refers to "the Department," a holdover from the DHCD era that has not been updated to the new name.

The governing document is the 2025-2026 Qualified Allocation Plan, whose body text reflects a public hearing held December 20, 2024. It is not a static document. In January 2026, HLC issued a formal amendment memo that (1) extended the QAP's effective period through 2027 "to ensure as much consistency as possible for the affordable housing delivery system," (2) raised the state tax credit processing fee from 3%/1.5% (for-profit/non-profit) to 5%/3.5%, (3) added a new requirement that new-construction elevator projects include at least 10% fully accessible units, (4) opened a waiver path from mandatory Enterprise Green Communities certification to an HLC-approved alternative such as LEED, (5) updated the 4% credit section to reflect that federal legislation enacted in July 2025 raises HLC's 9% per-capita authority by roughly $3 million for 2026 and 2027 and lowers the tax-exempt bond financing test from 50% to 25% starting in 2026, and (6) replaced the volume-cap pipeline language: where the original QAP text said the MassHousing/MassDevelopment volume-cap pipeline was "full through 2025," the amendment says "full through 2026," and adds new per-project and per-sponsor volume-cap allocation caps for 2026-2027. Mass.gov's own Qualified Allocation Plan page separately lists a "Final 2025-2026 LIHTC QAP (Posted February 9, 2026)" alongside the January 2026 amendment as two distinct current documents. A screening or underwriting tool built against only one of the two will cite superseded fee percentages or an outdated volume-cap status; both must be read together, with the amendment controlling wherever the two conflict.

Two agencies, two credit types, and a volume-cap constraint that changes site timing

EOHLC/HLC is "the allocating agency for the federal and state low-income housing tax credit programs" and prepares the QAP that governs both. But the QAP's own text is explicit that the 4% credit works differently: "The availability of 4% LIHTC -- formally allocated by HLC -- is tied directly to the availability of tax-exempt financing at MassHousing and MassDevelopment. The availability of tax-exempt financing, in turn, is tied to the availability of volume cap, based on annual allocations from the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and subsequent decisions by the Executive Office of Administration and Finance (ANF) on how to apportion the available volume." MassDevelopment is the current operating name of the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency (MDFA); both names refer to the same entity and appear interchangeably across state materials.

This matters for site screening because the 4% pipeline is a genuine scarcity constraint, not a formality. The QAP states directly that "the demand for volume cap for multifamily rental housing reached an all-time high" and that the pipelines at both quasi-publics were full through 2026 (as updated by the January 2026 amendment). A site that pencils only as a tax-exempt bond/4% deal -- which the current QAP requires for every preservation-set-aside project -- carries real timing risk independent of site quality: HLC's new 2026-2027 volume-cap parameters prioritize projects with existing Commonwealth funding awards by readiness, award year, and size; cap any one project at 30% of aggregate basis absent a written HLC waiver; cap any one sponsor at $100 million of volume cap per calendar year; and treat a project that hasn't closed by December 1 of its target year, without a joint HLC/bond-issuer extension, as having lost its allocation outright, to be reallocated. Federal legislation enacted in July 2025 lowers the tax-exempt bond financing test from 50% to 25% of aggregate basis starting in 2026, which HLC expects will help clear the backlog, but the QAP itself cautions that the lower threshold "will not be reduced to 25% for all projects" -- confirm which test applies to a specific deal rather than assuming the lower number governs automatically.

Every application must fit at least one of five priority funding categories -- before scoring even starts

Before a project reaches HLC's threshold or scoring review, it must fit within at least one of five priority funding categories established in the QAP's executive summary. This is a gate, not a scored line item -- a site and program concept that doesn't fit one of the five categories has no path into a competition at all, regardless of how it might otherwise score.

Category 5's "less than 12% SHI" test uses the same statewide Subsidized Housing Inventory that Chapter 40B's comprehensive-permit safe harbor uses -- but at a different percentage, for a different purpose, with a different legal effect. Category 5 is a QAP scoring-eligibility gate that rewards siting in under-served communities; Chapter 40B's 10% SHI threshold is a zoning-preemption safe harbor covered in this guide's entitlement-pathway phase. A site in a community at, say, 8% SHI qualifies for QAP priority category 5 and is also well below Chapter 40B's 10% safe-harbor line -- but the two percentages should never be treated as the same test or the same number.

"Quality of Site" is a threshold in this cycle, not a scored category

Unlike CTCAC's fixed site-amenity scoring table, HLC's 2025-2026/27 QAP states its policy on site quality in blunt terms: "Since an entire class of applications includes sites that have been accepted by the federal housing agency, HLC has elected not to evaluate 'site' as a competitive category in 2025-2026." Site quality survives only as Threshold #2 of twelve pass/fail threshold criteria (discussed further in this guide's site-control phase) -- every application must include "a site acceptable, by HLC standards, for the proposed housing use," evaluated against the Commonwealth's ten sustainable development principles, but there is no point table to screen against. HLC will presume a site acceptable if it is already the location of an occupied housing project with no significant change to the tenant group; otherwise, sponsors are encouraged to request an on-site HLC staff visit at least one month before the competition deadline.

Where HLC does score location, it does so through several narrower, separately-labeled scoring items inside the 86-point "Special Project Characteristics" category (Section XI-B) -- not a single unified site-scoring table. A screening tool for Massachusetts should map a candidate site against these specific items rather than inventing a composite "site score" the QAP itself does not produce.

QCT and state-designated DDA basis boost: two different lists, and one does not apply to 4% deals at all

Federal Qualified Census Tracts (QCTs) and HUD-designated Difficult Development Areas (DDAs) carry the standard federal 30% basis boost under 26 U.S.C. § 42(d)(5)(B). Massachusetts also exercises its own, separate authority to designate additional state DDAs, and that history is worth knowing in detail because it is easy to misapply. Acting under authority created by the 2008 Housing and Economic Recovery Act (HERA), then-DHCD added 61 named cities and towns to a state DDA list between 2009 and 2017 -- among them Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Worcester, Lowell, Lawrence, New Bedford, Springfield, Quincy, and Fall River, with the remainder of the 61-city list published in each year's QAP. The current QAP also separately continues DDA status for Barnstable County communities and for communities in the Brockton, MA Housing Metro FMR Area, both carried forward from the 2011 QAP.

The QAP states the critical limitation on its own state DDA list in plain terms: "Per the HERA legislation, these DDA designations do not apply to 4% credit projects financed with tax-exempt bonds." A site in one of the 61 listed cities is DDA-eligible for a 9% competitive application; the identical site financed as a tax-exempt bond/4% deal gets no state DDA boost from that designation at all. Even for an eligible 9% deal, the boost is not automatic: HLC "will determine the extent of the basis boost (up to 130%) for a project or a building within a project ... based on a given project's financial feasibility," and a boost granted to one project in a listed city does not obligate HLC to grant the same boost to another project in the same city if the second project does not need it to be feasible.

Sponsors in a community not on the current DDA list may ask HLC to add it, but the QAP warns that HLC "will require the sponsor to submit substantial documentation before it will evaluate such requests" -- this is not a quick administrative fix late in a deal's timeline.

Environmental and hazard screening: MassGIS/MassMapper is open data, but it is due diligence, not a scoring table

Massachusetts's standard public GIS viewer is MassMapper (maps.massgis.digital.mass.gov/MassMapper), which layers MassDEP-sourced environmental data over the state's parcel and hydrography base: wetlands and other hydrography, public water supply protection areas, Title 5 septic system buffers, landfills, air-quality-permitted facilities, and -- most relevant to a Phase I-adjacent screen -- MassDEP's statewide point dataset of oil and/or hazardous material disposal sites that have been reported and Tier Classified under M.G.L. Chapter 21E (the Massachusetts Oil and Hazardous Material Release Prevention and Response Act) and the Massachusetts Contingency Plan (310 CMR 40.0000), including sites carrying an Activity and Use Limitation (AUL) -- a recorded notice that contamination remains on site after cleanup. The Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EEA) also runs a separate Data Portal for permit, facility, inspection, and enforcement lookups.

None of this open data feeds a fixed-point exclusion table inside the LIHTC QAP the way CTCAC's site-hazard scoring does in California. It is diligence data that supports Threshold #2 (Quality of Site) and the Readiness-to-Proceed scoring category's expectation of an ASTM Phase I environmental site assessment (covered in this guide's site-control phase) -- a screening tool should treat a Chapter 21E hit or an AUL flag as a fact to carry into that Phase I conversation, not as a score to compute on its own.

Income and rent limits: HUD sets the numbers, MassHousing packages them

HUD determines the underlying Area Median Income figures and Multifamily Tax Subsidy Project (MTSP) income limits each year; MassHousing then publishes the derived Massachusetts LIHTC income and rent limit tables (titled, in recent years, "20XX HUD Income & Rent Limits") covering the state's income-limit areas. The area count in these filings is not perfectly stable year to year in the published file names -- confirm the current year's table rather than assuming a fixed area count.

On the average-income election (available since the 2018 federal Consolidated Appropriations Act), Massachusetts permits it only for 4% credit projects, not 9%, and limits sponsors to four income tiers -- 30%, 50%, 60%, and 80% of AMI -- narrower than the federal statute's full seven-tier menu (20/30/40/50/60/70/80%). A tax-exempt bond deal electing average income must still separately satisfy the bond program's own 20/50 or 40/60 test under Internal Revenue Code Section 142, because Section 142 has not been amended to incorporate the average-income election -- a stacking requirement that is easy to miss when a deal is modeled around the LIHTC test alone.