“If you need some assistance with that, and you can't afford the six to eight thousand dollars a month for some of these private-paid facilities, and you don't want to be isolated living at home, what happens is, you end up stuck in a nursing home, even though you don't really need to be there,” Mulligan says. “You end up going from wherever you lived to a place that's not clinically appropriate, doesn't allow you to be ambulatory, and to really live the life you could. And it costs the state a ton of money.”

The market is beginning to segment senior housing development in terms of income and affordability, says Delaveris.

“There's been a lot of private-pay assisted living development, a lot of relatively high-end products,” he says. “There's more of a need than this segment of the market can afford.”

Mulligan says the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are beginning to adapt rules to accommodate different kinds of care models.

“They're funding services that are intended to augment non-traditional health care,” he says. “They're funding things that help people live in shelters, transportation, food, things of that nature. There's a lot of people that can reside in that in-between zone, where they don't need health care, but they do need services.”

Financing for new models of affordable senior care can include using real estate assets for new uses, says Delaveris.

“We've got some other projects in the pipeline that that are taking that approach of reusing existing real estate and repurposing it to affordable senior living,” he says. “There's bringing services into lower acuity settings, like age restricted apartments, using other funding streams for those services.”

LIHTC options are just one option for assisted living properties, Delaveris says.

“These are relatively 'few and far between' projects in the grand scheme of the senior housing development landscape,” he says. “So bringing more funding routes, bringing more debt financing options through the agency programs, HUD and the bond market, whatever we can do to leverage our platform is a growth opportunity for us, and we think for the space, as more of these projects come to fruition.”