A Boston nonprofit is battling in court with an investor that wants to sell off low-income housing for profit. It's a story that's playing out across the country.
Charles Clark moved to Boston’s South End when he was a young musician, just getting by. Forty years later, he lives in the same historic brownstone, even as rising wealth has pushed many people out of the neighborhood.
He’s stayed thanks to a nonprofit that’s kept a few hundred apartments like his affordable. Tenants’ Development Corp. is one of the oldest groups of its kind in the nation, protecting the rights of renters many of them families of color and seniors.
But now, TDC and its residents are facing the fight of their lives, as a Denver-based investment firm battles for control of 36 of the nonprofit’s properties. It’s a tactic Alden Torch Financial and firms like it are using to squeeze extra profits out of the federal government’s chief program for backing low-income housing, according to court cases in multiple states and interviews with more than 20 housing and legal specialists.