Affordable housing at risk of disappearing across the US
LOS ANGELES
While Americans continue to struggle under unrelentingly high rents , as many as 223,0000 affordable housing units across the U.S. could disappear in the next five years alone.
It leaves low-income tenants 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.
Those affordable housing units were built with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, or LIHTC, a federal program launched in 1987 that provides tax credits to developers in exchange for keeping rents low.
It has pumped out 3.6 million units nationwide, and its expansion is now central to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ housing plan to build 3 million new homes .
The catch? The buildings 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.
Data on LIHTC units that will lose their affordability nationally remains a rough estimate.
The best nationwide analysis estimated that by 2030 roughly 350,000 LIHTC units are at risk of losing affordability.
That’s 1 million units by 2040, according to the National Housing Preservation Database.
Not all units that lose LIHTC’s affordability protections become market rate. Some are kept affordable by other government subsidies, by merciful landlords or by states, including California, Colorado and New York, that have worked to keep costs low.
Still, it’s a sizeable loss to a housing market already in dire need of new units.
“If we are losing the homes that are currently affordable and available to households, then we’re losing ground on the crisis,” said Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
“It’s sort of like having a boat with a hole at the bottom,” she said.
Local governments and nonprofits can purchase expiring apartments, new tax credits or other subsidies can be applied that extend the affordability, or tenants can organize to try to force action from landlords and city officials.
Still, local governments or nonprofits scraping together the funds to buy apartment buildings is far from a guarantee.
And while new tax credits can reup a lapsing LIHTC affordability, they are limited, doled out to states by the Internal Revenue Service based on population.
