The country does not have enough affordable housing, and building new units is slow, expensive, and politically fraught nearly everywhere. That leaves preservation as one of the more practical paths forward. The units we already have are considerably cheaper to keep than to replace, which is why so much policy attention has shifted toward extending the life of existing stock rather than adding to it. The problem is that this stock is getting old. Nearly 500,000 homes created through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program will hit their 30-year affordability milestone by the end of the decade, and public housing carries an estimated $90 billion maintenance backlog. Preserving these buildings means renovating them, and renovating them means dealing with the fact that people are living inside.

The complication is that the buildings are full. Renovating an occupied property is a different exercise than renovating a vacant one, and in affordable housing the residents are frequently the people with the fewest resources to absorb disruption. Every owner facing a major recapitalization confronts the same question, which is what happens to the people living there while the work gets done.

Deferred maintenance can delay that question but not indefinitely. “Preventative maintenance only lasts so long,” said Natalie Levkovitz, co-founder of Equally Crafted Management, a firm that specializes in tenant relocation for renovation projects. “At some point major upgrades need to be made and these will require a tenant relocation.” Systems replacements, envelope work, and unit-level rehabs eventually require access that cannot be scheduled around a household’s daily life.

Many owners try to avoid relocation entirely by phasing work around occupancy. That is often the wrong call. “It can be more economical to just move tenants out. You get better work out of the contractors that way,” Levkovitz said. Crews working in an occupied unit are managing noise restrictions, limited hours, and constant stop-start disruption. The work takes longer, costs more in labor hours, and often produces lower quality results than the same scope in an empty unit. Whatever an owner saves by avoiding relocation tends to disappear into schedule overruns.

Executing a relocation well is difficult, and getting it wrong creates problems that outlast the construction timeline. “Getting someone to move when you want them to move is really hard,” Levkovitz said. “Seniors could have a lot of health conditions, families are really busy. It is never a convenient time.” A resident with mobility limitations, a household with children in a specific school, a person managing a medical condition with a nearby provider, all of them are being asked to accommodate a schedule set by a construction calendar. Done badly, it produces animosity, regulatory complaints, and sometimes litigation.

The legal framework varies enough between jurisdictions that experience in one state transfers imperfectly to another. “Every state has its own nuances,” Levkovitz said. “In Massachusetts we can only have residents out for 30 days. In Virginia it’s 90.” Those windows constrain the entire construction sequence. A scope of work requiring 60 days in a unit is not viable in a state capping displacement at 30, which means either the scope changes or the phasing does. Add the federal requirements attached to LIHTC, Section 8, and HUD-assisted properties and the compliance picture gets complicated quickly.

What tends to work is starting with communication rather than notice. “I like to first have a conversation in a town hall meeting where we can try to get them excited about the renovations,” Levkovitz said. “They are inevitably going to vent and complain about all the things that don’t work, so we listen to them and tell them that their issues will be addressed with the work being done.” The complaints that surface in those meetings are usually an asset. They establish the case for the work in the residents’ own words, which is more persuasive than anything an owner can say about it.

Holdouts happen regardless. “If they say no you have to find out the why,” Levkovitz said. “Sometimes you get people that are really scared about what the process is going to be like. Sometimes for the hardest holdouts you can just find a creative solution.” A resident refusing to move may be worried about a pet, or about losing possessions, or about whether they will actually be allowed to return. Those concerns are solvable once identified, and they tend to stay hidden if the conversation starts adversarially.

A growing number of owners are bringing in third-party specialists rather than assigning the work to teams who have other responsibilities. “We try to act as the middleman in the project so we are the direct point of contact for the tenants, which takes a lot of liability away from the contractors and property managers,” Levkovitz said. “They have their own jobs to do.” A property manager who has to maintain a long-term relationship with residents is poorly positioned to tell them to pack up their apartment, and a contractor focused on schedule is poorly positioned to manage anxiety about where someone’s belongings will be stored.

The volume of work coming will force more owners to develop this capability. The LIHTC properties reaching their milestones were built in the 1990s and are due for systems that have reached the end of their service lives. Public housing’s backlog is not shrinking. Workforce and naturally occurring affordable housing is aging on the same curve. We are likely to see relocation move from a specialized problem that comes up occasionally to a standard line item in how these deals get underwritten.

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