The nation’s affordable housing shortage affects millions of people with low wages, but for people with disabilities, finding quality housing they can afford is even harder. One in 4 adults in the US has some type of disability, and they face further housing challenges related to affordability, physical accessibility, and disability discrimination.

Within federally assisted housing, these challenges are compounded by additional obstacles people face because of their incomes, age, intersections with race and ethnicity, and the age of housing stock where they live. Twenty-three percent of residents living in housing funded through the US Department of Housing and Urban Development reported having a disability. Almost all households living in public housing have very low incomes (below 50 percent of an area’s median income), and almost 3 out of 4 households have extremely low incomes (below 30 percent).

More than 1 out of 3 working-age residents who are the head of a household living in public housing report having a disability; this increases to 40 percent for those ages 62 and older. Residents in federally assisted housing are also more likely to be Black than the general population. And 51 percent of public housing units are more than 40 years old, making them difficult and expensive to modify to satisfy reasonable accommodation requests and make more physically accessible.

To understand obstacles to accessible and service-connected housing for younger adults, families, and children with disabilities, for the first phase of our research, we interviewed experts in housing and disability law, federally assisted housing programs, and disability advocacy. We focused on three federal housing programs that provide low-cost rental housing to eligible households with low incomes: public housing, project-based rental assistance through the Section 8 program, and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program.

We found three key challenges federally assisted housing programs face in adequately serving people with disabilities.

  1. No centralized place exists to find and apply for accessible, affordable housing
  2. Older buildings lack sufficient resources for adequate maintenance and reasonable accommodations
  3. The reasonable accommodation process is burdensome to administer and requires knowledge and persistence from residents

Read the full article about helping residents with disabilities by Ebonie Megibow and Corianne Payton Scally at Urban Institute.