Affordable housing financing resources are scarce, and MassHousing is always looking to stretch those dollars as far as possible.

At the Mill and 3 Apartments in Chelmsford, a new 108-unit mixed-income rental community being built by Princeton Properties, MassHousing made a tax-exempt $23.6 million permanent loan by issuing short-term, variable-rate revenue bonds and using recycled private activity volume cap.

Federal law allows state housing finance agencies to reuse their annual tax-exempt volume cap in instances where a volume cap loan has been prepaid. This allows affordable housing developers to access tax-exempt interest rates, while preserving scarce resources such as Low-Income Housing Tax Credits for other projects.