Ashley Hinson spent her time in the Iowa House making a state tax credit for rural housing developers bigger. She then ran for Congress promising to expand tax breaks for rural developers.
Four years after her first vote, her husband co-founded a rural housing development company. Less than two years after that, it was awarded $1 million in credits from the program she had enlarged.
The votes
In 2017, Hinson was a state representative. American Journal News laid out the sequence.
Iowa already offered housing projects approved by the state economic development agency a sales tax refund and an investment tax credit worth up to 10% of a project's cost. S.F. 488, which Hinson backed, did two things:
- It set aside $5 million of those incentives specifically for housing projects in smaller cities.
- It doubled the credit for those projects, from 10% to 20% of project cost.
In practical terms, a developer building a $2 million project in one of those smaller cities could now claim a $400,000 credit instead of $200,000. The bill defines a small city as one outside Iowa's eleven most populous counties — a category that did not include Hinson's own Linn County seat.
In 2019 she voted again, this time to raise the set-aside from $5 million to $10 million.
Then she ran for Congress in 2020 on a platform that included expanding tax incentives for rural developers.
Who ended up collecting
In 2021, Hinson's husband, Matthew Arenholz, co-founded BAM Development LLC, which builds and operates apartment complexes across the Midwest.
His co-founders were two sitting Iowa state representatives: Joe Mitchell — now the Republican nominee in Iowa's 2nd Congressional District — and Michael Bousselot. Mitchell was not in the legislature for the 2017 vote; he arrived in January 2019, served alongside Hinson, and joined her in voting for the 2019 bill that doubled the set-aside.
In 2023, BAM Development was awarded $1 million in tax credits made possible by S.F. 488, for its Emerald Place Townhomes development in Clear Lake, Iowa. The state program requires a local match, and the Clear Lake city council voted to put up $1 million — as a 100% property tax abatement for four years plus the extension of 14th Street.
Two Republican legislators voted to double a developer subsidy. Two years later, one of them and the other's husband co-founded a development company, and it was awarded that subsidy.
The letters of support came from her donors and her earmark
To win the S.F. 488 credit, BAM had to submit letters of support from local stakeholders. Two of them are worth naming.
One came from Sukup Manufacturing Co., an Iowa grain-equipment maker. Members of the Sukup family have given a combined $47,500 to Hinson's congressional campaigns and another $4,000 to her leadership PAC.
The other came from the North Iowa Corridor Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit covering Mason City, Clear Lake and greater Cerro Gordo County — all inside Hinson's congressional district. In February, Hinson used her seat on the House Appropriations Committee to secure $3 million for the North Iowa Corridor Workforce Housing Initiative — a project that carries the group's name, though the money's intended recipient is Cerro Gordo County. Her written funding request asserted she had no financial interest in the project.
So a company her husband co-founded needed backing letters, and got one from a family that has given her over $50,000 and one from the economic development group whose namesake housing project she later won $3 million for.
This is the second time her husband's business has run through her office
On August 27, NOTUS reported that Arenholz helped arrange a 2023 meeting between Hinson, other members of Congress, and an insurance industry lobbying group he was working with.
We covered that one: her first Senate ad promises she will take on big insurance, while her husband chaired the government affairs committee of the insurance lobby's Iowa branch and helped set up its meeting with all four of Iowa's U.S. House members, including his wife. The group's PAC has given her campaign $45,000.
Arenholz is also a stakeholder in a private-equity backed brokerage firm.
Her business partner is running on the opposite position
The other half of this story is on the ballot in Iowa's 2nd District.
Joe Mitchell, BAM's co-founder, now campaigns as a critic of housing subsidies, calling the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit "a disaster" that needs to be "totally reformed" and complaining it is "too much paperwork." We wrote about that this week: his companies collected $2,559,880 from the Iowa credit he voted to expand, including the Clear Lake project.
Iowa's housing subsidies are a disaster when someone else claims them and a business plan when this group does.
The money keeps arriving from people with business before her
This is a recurring shape in Hinson's finances, not a one-off. The man whose carbon pipeline company won the power to seize Iowa farmland by eminent domain has given her committees $42,000 and hosted her Senate fundraiser.
Iowans looking at the state's housing shortage are entitled to ask whose housing the subsidies were meant to build.
What the record shows
Ashley Hinson backed a 2017 bill that doubled Iowa's investment tax credit for rural housing developers and set aside $5 million for them, then voted in 2019 to double that set-aside to $10 million. In 2021 her husband co-founded a development firm with two of her legislative colleagues. In 2023 that firm was awarded $1 million in credits created by the law she backed, supported by letters from a family that has given her more than $50,000 and from the economic development group whose namesake housing project she later won $3 million of federal funding for. One of the firm's co-founders is now running for Congress against housing subsidies.
Source
Jesse Valentine, "Hinson backed tax credits that helped her husband's company", American Journal News, September 1, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall.
