Giving Compass' Take:
- Jesse Bedayn and Arushi Gupta explain the expected dwindling of affordable housing units as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit's 30-year minimum lapses.
- What is your role as a donor in preventing affordable housing development from further declining, leaving low-income communities with few options?
- Learn more about key issues in homelessness and housing and how you can help.
- Search our Guide to Good for nonprofits focused on homelessness in your area.
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For more than two decades, the low rent on Marina Maalouf’s affordable housing unit — an apartment in a blocky development in Los Angeles’ Chinatown — was a saving grace for her family, including a granddaughter who has autism.
But that grace had an expiration date. For Maalouf and her family it arrived in 2020.
The landlord, no longer legally obligated to maintain affordable housing units, hiked rent from $1,100 to $2,660 in 2021 — out of reach for Maalouf and her family. Maalouf’s nights are haunted by fears her yearslong eviction battle will end in sleeping bags on a friend’s floor or worse.
While Americans continue to struggle under unrelentingly high rents, as many as 223,000 affordable housing units like Maalouf’s across the U.S. could be yanked out from under them in the next five years alone.
It leaves low-income tenants caught facing protracted eviction battles, scrambling to pay a two-fold rent increase or more, or shunted back into a housing market where costs can easily eat half a paycheck.
The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit's 30-Year Minimum Will Impact the Availability of Affordable Housing Units
Those affordable housing units were built with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, or LIHTC, a federal program established in 1986 that provides tax credits to developers in exchange for keeping rents low. It has pumped out 3.6 million units since then and boasts over half of all federally supported low-income housing nationwide.
“It’s the lifeblood of affordable housing development,” said Brian Rossbert, who runs Housing Colorado, an organization advocating for affordable housing units.
That lifeblood isn’t strictly red or blue. By combining social benefits with tax breaks and private ownership, LIHTC has enjoyed bipartisan support to develop more affordable housing units. Its expansion is now central to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ housing plan to build 3 million new homes.
The catch? The units typically only need to be kept affordable for a minimum of 30 years. For the wave of LIHTC construction in the 1990s, those deadlines are arriving now, threatening to hemorrhage affordable housing supply when Americans need it most.
Read the full article about the dwindling of affordable housing by Jesse Bedayn and Arushi Gupta at The Associated Press.