The 100-Year Pivot

For thirty-seven years, America has been spending more money to build less housing for the people who need it most.

The 100-Year Pivot tells the story of how a production system became a compliance architecture, and what it will take to restore the ladder before it is too late.

David Petroni traces the century-long transformation of American housing policy, from the New Deal through the creation of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit to the present moment where nurses, teachers, and logistics workers cannot afford to live near the jobs that keep the economy running.

The numbers are not hard to find. Home prices are up 60% since 2019. The median home now requires an income of approximately $126,700 to afford. Only about 13% of renters qualify. More than twenty-two million renter households are paying more than 30% of their income for housing. Those are not abstractions. That is the workforce, the people every city needs to function, being priced out of the communities they sustain.

Drawing on 37 years of experience in affordable housing development, Petroni examines how the LIHTC program drifted from production to syndicated complexity, how institutional capital converted shelter into a portfolio asset class, and how well-intentioned rules now produce results nobody wanted. He argues that the practitioner perspective - grounded in capital stacks, deal structures, and operational reality - is the necessary lens for understanding what went wrong and what it will take to fix it.

"The fractured foundation is not cultural. It is mathematical. And math eventually enforces reality."

This book is for the people entering this industry now. Not because the solutions are obvious, but because understanding where the program drifted from the way it was originally designed to function is the necessary first step to getting it right.