The LIHTC program turns 40 this year (at the time of this writing, May 2026).
Most of the firms you'd recognize at the top of the affordable housing industry trace their foundations back to 1986, when the Tax Reform Act created the program. Some go back further. The names have been on the AHF 50 lists for decades.
Lincoln Avenue Communities is ten years old.
The company was founded in April 2016. According to its own April 2026 press release on the Landmark on Scioto groundbreaking in Columbus, Ohio, it now operates in 33 states with a portfolio of 200+ properties comprising 30,500+ units housing 85,000+ residents. Per Affordable Housing Finance's May 2026 AHF 50 announcement covering 2025 calendar-year activity, the firm topped the developers list for the second year in a row with 2,989 starts across 15 developments, and acquired nearly 2,500 additional units.
Most of the industry knows the name. Far fewer know the story.
Where it started
Jeremy Bronfman did not come from affordable housing.
He grew up in the Bronfman family, whose name traces back to Seagram, once the world's largest distilled spirits company. His grandfather Edgar Sr. ran the World Jewish Congress for 28 years. His uncle Edgar Jr. ran Warner Music. His father Matthew Bronfman is chairman and CEO of BHB Holdings, the family's private investment firm, with stakes in IKEA Israel, the Shufersal supermarket chain, Israel Discount Bank, and real estate across multiple continents. Jeremy graduated from Stanford with a degree in public policy and from Harvard Business School with an MBA.
Jeremy's own early career was in oil and gas. He founded an independent oil and gas company called Forge Energy, built it up, and sold it. Then he became CEO of a big data software firm called Enigma Technologies. LIHTC was nowhere on his radar.
The introduction came in the form of a Year 11 deal.
This is from the Tax Credit Advisor interview Bronfman did with NH&RA President and CEO Peter Bell at the NH&RA Annual Meeting at The Breakers in March 2026: "I learned about it originally after being solicited to invest in a Year 11 deal by a sponsor who needed capital and was looking to bridge to year 15. After that, I really started studying the industry."
For people new to the program, a Year 11 secondary deal is a sophisticated piece of the LIHTC capital structure. It is not the kind of deal you put in front of a buyer who has never heard of Section 42. The fact that this was Jeremy's introduction tells you that whoever made it recognized something. He had the capital. He had the analytical training. He could understand the math.
He bought the deal. And he kept studying.
In April 2016, he founded Lincoln Avenue Capital alongside his brother Eli and a third partner, Neal Schore. The firm is now headquartered in Santa Monica and New York City, with team members in 14 additional states.
The first phase: acquisition and preservation
From 2016 to 2019, Lincoln Avenue was an acquisition shop.
That's a less visible part of the affordable housing industry than ground-up development, but it's where a massive share of the units live. A meaningful share of the existing LIHTC stock has been operating long enough to be coming out of compliance, ownership is turning over, and there is a constant flow of preservation transactions. Lincoln Avenue went hard at this.
The company acquired existing LIHTC and Section 8 properties, recapitalized them with new tax credits where possible, and operated them. By doing this at high volume, they built out the operational muscle of the firm. They learned how to underwrite acquisitions, work with state agencies on resyndications, manage construction at scale, and run an asset management division that could handle a growing national portfolio.
By 2020 the firm had crossed the threshold from boutique to serious. SVP of Development Russ Condas told Tax Credit Advisor that the company had "just over 40" employees when he joined that year. The firm was getting noticed on the AHF Top 50 lists.
The pivot to ground-up
In 2019, Jeremy made the decision he has since described as the most pivotal in the company's history. Lincoln Avenue would build ground-up new construction.
That's a different business from acquisition and preservation. The capital stacks are more complicated. The development timelines are longer. The risks are different. The conventional industry wisdom is that a firm with deep acquisition muscle takes years, sometimes a decade, to credibly add a new construction sleeve.
COVID hit roughly six months later.
Lincoln Avenue grew through it.
By 2024 the firm had started 17 ground-up developments comprising 3,167 affordable homes, enough to put it at #1 on the AHF 50 developers list when AHF published the rankings in May 2025. In 2025 it started 2,989 affordable homes across 15 developments and topped the list again in May 2026.
The ground-up "firsts" by state form their own list. Per LAC's own press releases: Wisconsin (Huxley Yards in Madison, 553 units, described in LAC's groundbreaking release as the largest ground-up affordable housing development ever completed in Wisconsin). Arizona (Cottonwood Ranch in Casa Grande, 300 units, the firm's first joint venture with its affiliated nonprofit Fairview Housing Partners). Nevada (Pinyon Apartments in downtown Reno, 252 units). Michigan (Huron Vista in Ypsilanti). Oklahoma (The Reserve at Chisholm Creek in Oklahoma City, 267 units, groundbreaking November 2025). Ohio (Landmark on Scioto in Columbus, 321 units, groundbreaking April 2026). Louisiana (the historic Tivoli Place rehabilitation in New Orleans, which subsequently won a Novogradac Journal of Tax Credits Historic Rehabilitation Award).
The Ranches at Gunsmoke in Maricopa, Arizona, financed in late 2024, is the firm's first build-to-rent affordable development. It is a 271-unit single-family-rental community for households earning up to 60% AMI, financed with construction and permanent loans from Citibank, $65 million in tax-exempt bonds from the Arizona Industrial Development Authority, and $49 million in LIHTC and solar equity syndicated by WNC.
What the scale produces
The unit count is what gets covered. What happens inside the units is the point.
Start with preservation. Most affordable housing dies quietly. Year 15 hits, the original tax credits expire, and a market-rate buyer recapitalizes the property out of the program. Lincoln Avenue has built a preservation engine to keep it. Tivoli Place in downtown New Orleans, 163 senior units, reopened in March 2025 with a 20-year HAP renewal and subsequently won Novogradac's Historic Rehabilitation Award. Rica Vista in Alameda locked in NOAH preservation across 186 units at up to 80% AMI for 55 years in joint structure with the Housing Authority of the City of Alameda. GE Tower in Atlanta, a 201-unit historic high-rise in the Mechanicsville neighborhood near MARTA, was acquired through the inaugural transaction of the MARTA-Morgan Stanley-NEF Greater Atlanta TOD Preservation Fund and now carries a 100% Atlanta Housing Authority HomeFlex Payment Assistance Agreement. These are not new units. They are units that would have been lost.
The work inside the buildings matches the work to acquire them. Lincoln Avenue partners with Family Scholar House at four Florida properties (Valencia Park in Orlando, Park City in Miami, Malibu Bay in West Palm Beach, Malibu Gardens in Homestead) to support single parents pursuing degrees. Twenty units at InterQuest Ridge in Colorado Springs are set aside for veterans through the Mt. Carmel Veterans Service Center. Thirteen permanent supportive housing units at Marshall Pointe in Arvada serve formerly homeless residents in partnership with Family Tree. Seventy-four project-based vouchers anchor NSA East Bank in New Orleans. Eight Section 811 vouchers for residents with disabilities are integrated into Forest Edge in Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin. The Morgan Stanley education partnership runs at five LAC properties across Florida, New York, Oregon, and Nevada. The pattern across the portfolio is that the resident services are real, named, and connected to specific community partners — not a line item on a marketing page.
The operating model
Most national developers at Lincoln Avenue's volume run an in-house general contractor, an in-house property manager, or both. The conventional logic is that vertical integration is how you protect margins on the developer fee.
Lincoln Avenue does neither.
Construction goes to outside GCs. McShane Construction is building Bishops Woods in Brookfield, Wisconsin. Corporate Contractors Inc built Huxley Yards in Madison. On-site property management goes to outside operators. LHP Capital continues to manage the 37-property tranche LAC acquired equity in. Maloney Properties manages the New Hampshire portfolio including Residences at Chestnut. The Florida portfolio runs through other regional firms. What LAC keeps in-house is asset services — the owner-side oversight function — along with development, origination, finance, construction management, operations, and resident services. The roughly 160 people inside the firm are, as Russ Condas described it to Tax Credit Advisor, "effectively a 120 person development company that works on our new pipeline and oversees our existing portfolio." (Headcount has grown since that interview — the most recent Tax Credit Advisor piece with Bronfman in March 2026 puts the number at 160.)
That is a structural bet. The implicit theory is that the firm captures more value by being good at deal origination, capital structuring, and asset oversight than it would by absorbing the cost and management complexity of running construction and property management businesses.
At #1 on the AHF 50 for two years running, the bet appears to be paying off.
The twelve project partners
The development organization is structured around a Regional Project Partners platform. Bronfman described it to Tax Credit Advisor as "twelve partners" who "each have their own region, or specific type of deal execution."
That's a real operating model, not org-chart fiction. Most national developers have regional offices with VPs who oversee a regional pipeline but report into a central deal committee. Lincoln Avenue's project partners source, structure, and close deals with meaningful autonomy. The CEO's stated role is "creating the circumstances where the development partners think they have the best resources available to execute on what they're good at."
It's closer to how a partnership at a Goldman or a McKinsey runs partner-level autonomy than how a typical real estate operator runs regional VPs.
Publicly identifiable partners include Stacy Kaplowitz, the firm's VP and Managing Regional Partner who has appeared on the Mid-Atlantic platform deals including Headen Spring. Nick Bracco covers Virginia, Maryland, and DC. Kevin McDonell runs Wisconsin. Kyle Brasser covers the Upper Midwest. Hume An runs the Midwest with explicit Illinois execution. James Riley runs Ohio. Blake Hopkins runs Texas. Jordan Richter runs Florida. Ben Taylor covers the Mountain West and Southwest and is publicly identified as the firm's build-to-rent product lead. David Garcia covers Louisiana and Oklahoma with a parallel historic tax credit and adaptive reuse specialization. Scott Shaw led the New Hampshire entry on Residences at Chestnut.
The Santa Monica rule
One detail that gets less attention than it deserves: per Bronfman's stated culture rule, everyone on the development team has to work in Santa Monica for at least their first four years before they can go regional.
In 2026, that is a deliberate choice. Every other firm at this scale is either fully distributed or maintains regional offices because they have decided geographic decentralization is necessary for national execution. Lincoln Avenue is doing the opposite, on purpose, while operating in 33 states.
The implicit theory is that the deal-execution muscle is best built sitting next to the senior partners, and that the regional execution work happens after that apprenticeship period.
The Amdur signal
When the President of NH&RA leaves a trade association to run policy at a six-year-old developer, that tells you something about both sides of the trade.
Most affordable developers treat policy as a check they write to AHTCC dues and an occasional FlyIn. Lincoln Avenue built a senior leadership role around it and gave the person doing the job a 501(c)(3) affiliate, Fairview Housing Partners, to also run as Executive Director. Fairview does three things at once. It provides resident services. It serves as a nonprofit joint venture partner on deals (the firm's South Forty Apartments acquisition in Billings, Montana, was structured with Fairview as Administrative General Partner). And it houses the policy and impact function.
Most operator-affiliated nonprofits do one of those three things. Doing all three inside one entity, led by a former NH&RA president, is a more institutional approach than what most operators run.
The alumni story
One detail that doesn't show up in the headline numbers: the people who have left.
The most significant departure is Yoni Gruskin. He was a founding partner of Lincoln Avenue, joined in April 2016, and per Ulysses Development Group's own bio led the firm's growth over five years overseeing the acquisition of more than 11,000 units. In December 2020 he left.
In January 2021 he co-founded Ulysses Development Group in Denver with Connor Larr, who came from The Related Companies.
By May 2026, per Ulysses Development Group's own website, the firm has more than 2,400 homes under ownership including over 700 homes under construction, plus a development and acquisitions pipeline of more than 2,000 homes across five-plus states. The firm has built ground-up developments in Colorado (Meadowmark in Castle Rock, Harvest Hill in Broomfield), Arizona (Dahlia Village and Salt River Flats in Phoenix, The Acacia at Youngtown), Nevada (The Ridge at Sun Valley near Reno, The Prospector in downtown Reno), and Florida (Osprey Sound senior community in Orlando). The firm is in exclusive negotiation with the Regional Transportation District in Denver to build up to 900 affordable units on an A-Line park-and-ride lot.
It's the clearest example of the Lincoln Avenue alumni network beginning to spawn its own firms.
Other notable departures include Nina-Lee Jewell Alhambra, who left her VP of Asset Services role at Lincoln Avenue in early 2023 to become Chief Operating Officer at April Housing, the Blackstone Real Estate portfolio company that manages a roughly 90,000-unit LIHTC portfolio. In January 2026 she joined Croatan Investments as Managing Partner, leading the build-out of their new affordable housing platform. And Matt Glatting, who came to Lincoln Avenue through the firm's acquisition of a majority interest in the HPET REIT and served as VP of Planning and Strategy plus Treasurer of Fairview Housing Partners, left in March 2023 to become CFO of NeighborWorks Capital, a national CDFI.
One founding partner spun out a competitor. One asset management VP went from Lincoln Avenue to Blackstone's affordable platform to leading a new institutional platform of her own. One finance VP became CFO of a national CDFI. That's a meaningful alumni track record for a ten-year-old firm.
Where they are today
Lincoln Avenue's stated growth plan is roughly 15 to 17 ground-up starts a year going forward.
The firm has told Affordable Housing Finance that it is entering new states. The 2025 list of new entries Bronfman cited included Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island. The Oklahoma entry happened in November 2025 with the Chisholm Creek groundbreaking. The Massachusetts entry is a 41-unit all-affordable building at 1471 Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan, approved by the Boston Planning Department in December 2024 and now under construction, in partnership with Ionic Development. (New Hampshire was an earlier entry, with the 142-unit Residences at Chestnut in Manchester reaching first-building occupancy in August 2025.) The Virginia and Maryland adjacency is happening through a partnership with the Fairfax County Redevelopment and Housing Authority on the Tysons Central site, where FCRHA will retain fee ownership under a ground lease and Lincoln Avenue will develop up to 525 affordable homes.
The firm's recurring capital partners include Boston Financial Investment Management (which has aggregated more than 1,500 affordable homes with the firm over a decade), National Equity Fund, US Bank, CREA, WNC, Capital One, Stonehenge Capital, Chase, Citibank, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Huntington National Bank, Customers Bank, and Raymond James. PGIM and Freddie Mac through Greystone show up on the permanent financing side. State HFA partners include Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency, Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority, Illinois Housing Development Authority, Louisiana Housing Corporation, Arizona Industrial Development Authority and Arizona Department of Housing, Nevada Housing Division, Colorado Housing and Finance Authority, and Virginia Housing.
What it means for the rest of us
Here is what we keep coming back to in our coverage of this industry.
The firms at the top of the AHF 50 today are not the firms that were at the top ten years ago. The Lincoln Avenue story is the clearest example, but it isn't the only one. The industry is younger and more dynamic than early-career professionals usually assume.
That matters because the assumption in affordable housing is often that the door is closed. The big firms are big. The named partners are entrenched. The path to building something of your own is foreclosed unless you came up through one of the legacy shops in the 1990s.
None of that is true.
Jeremy Bronfman was an oil and gas guy ten years ago. Yoni Gruskin was an analyst at Related when he co-founded Lincoln Avenue in 2016. Thom Amdur ran a trade association before he ran policy at an operator.
The careers being built in this industry right now look different from the careers that built the industry to begin with.
If you're early in your career and you're wondering whether there's still room to build, the Lincoln Avenue story is the answer.
The door is open.
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