Molly Bryson is Team Leader of Ballard Spahr's Tax Credits Team. She focuses her practice both on using federal and state tax credits to finance affordable housing, businesses in low-income communities, historic preservation, and solar energy, and on using the Qualified Opportunity Zone (QOZ) program to finance community economic development throughout the U.S. and its territories.
In the QOZ portion of her practice, Molly focuses on advising investors, fund managers, and developers on the evolving tax, organizational, and business structuring requirements of this new program created by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.
Molly focuses the affordable housing portion of her practice on providing strategic tax and business advice for both low-income and mixed-income projects financed by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) available to housing authorities, state housing finance agencies, developers, investors, and syndicators. Many of these matters involve additional federal and/or state subsidy programs, like HUD's Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program. She also regularly advises on tax-exempt issues that can arise with the involvement of nonprofit developers, Year 15 issues, and risk assessments of LIHTC investment funds. She served as the firm's representative on the Board of the Affordable Housing Tax Credit Coalition from 2015 to 2017, and regularly advocates on Capitol Hill for the strengthening and expansion of the Low Income Housing Tax Credit on behalf of the Affordable Rental Housing Action Campaign.
Molly focuses the New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) portion of her practice on CDE (lender) and QALICB (borrower) representation. Recently, she represented a CDE in its lending to borrowers that were renovating office and school spaces in low-income communities in the Maryland and D.C. areas, and represented a borrower in structuring the NMTC and historic rehabilitation tax credit (HTC) financing of a health center in Baltimore, Maryland. Molly's additional representative matters involving HTCs include representing a developer/sponsor in the structuring and negotiating of the HTC financing of a historic hotel in Baltimore, Maryland.
Molly's investment tax credit (ITC) portion of her practice focuses on the tax structuring of community solar and commercial, residential, and utility scale solar projects on behalf of developers/sponsors and lenders.
Molly is a frequent lecturer on tax credits and has spoken at a number of conferences, including ones sponsored by the American Bar Association Forum on Affordable Housing & Community Development, the National Council of State Housing Agencies, the Pennsylvania Housing Alliance, the NMTC Coalition, SEIA, CohnReznick LLP, and Novogradac & Company LLP.
