Jason Levesque’s column (March 6) on affordable housing in Lewiston missed the mark in many places.

We have several tools to foster the development of affordable housing, chiefly the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit and, for historic properties, state and federal historic tax credits. Those provide most of the funding to rehabilitate the Intown Manor into 32 units of affordable senior housing.

Leaving aside federal funding, MaineHousing is providing $16,189 per unit, and the city is providing $9,275 per unit. You can’t put someone in a single family home for $25,464.

The only way we can use the LIHTC is for new or substantially renovated rent restricted units. We cannot use it to put families into home ownership. The state and the federal historic tax credits are specifically for historic structures, whether they are used for housing or another purpose. It is purely saving an historic building that makes it expensive.

These rental properties have construction and energy efficient standards that make all major components last for 30 years. They include replacement reserves to take care of capital repairs, and operating reserves for future issues like spikes in the price of heating fuel.

That’s different than putting a household in a home and leaving them to fend for themselves.

As a practical matter, we have no federal tools to construct low-cost homes for home ownership. Whether there should be or not is a matter for policy makers; we can only use the tools we have.

We support revitalization of urban areas by encouraging renovation of downtown properties. Often these have been vacant for years, with no one stepping forward to use them as commercial space. They are at risk of deteriorating beyond repair. The choice becomes housing or nothing, not housing or business.

Housing contributes to downtown revitalization and helps create the critical mass needed to encourage more investments. Seniors or working family residents in our properties usually make 50 to 60 percent of the area median income. They spend their money near home and help grow the downtown.

These housing developments are privately owned and pay property taxes.

We discourage sprawl caused by building new housing on the outskirts. Sprawl has costs that may not show up in the home’s price, but contribute to municipal expenses through the cost of building and maintaining more roads, extension of water and sewer lines, pressure to create new schools, and traffic congestion. Services and transportation are already available downtown.

Government can no longer afford to do one thing with each dollar. Developing housing downtown provides several benefits. It creates affordable housing, saves historic structures, revitalizes urban centers, uses available financing tools, improves Maine’s housing stock, and generates jobs.

Dale McCormick, Augusta

Director of MaineHousing