LOS ANGELES (AP) – Americans continue to struggle with high rents, but as many as 223,000 affordable housing units could disappear across the country over the next five years alone.
As a result, low-income tenants face long eviction battles, forcing them to scramble to pay rent increases that more than double, or be thrown back into the housing market that can easily eat up half their paychecks.
These affordable housing units are built using the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), a federal program started in 1987 that provides tax credits to developers in exchange for keeping rents low. It was done.
It supplies 3.6 million homes nationwide, and its expansion is now central to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ housing plan to build 3 million new homes.
What about the prey? Typically, buildings must remain affordable for at least 30 years. The wave of LIHTC construction in the 1990s is now reaching its deadline, threatening to bleed into the affordable housing supply that Americans need most.
How many affordable units could be lost in the coming decades?
Data on LIHTC units that will lose affordability nationally remains a rough estimate.
The best national analysis estimates that approximately 350,000 LIHTC units are at risk of losing affordability by 2030. According to the National Housing Preservation Database, this will be 1 million homes by 2040.
Not all units that lose LIHTC affordability protection will be market-rate. Some housing is kept affordable by other government subsidies, benevolent landlords, or states like California, Colorado, and New York that strive to keep costs low.
Still, it’s a significant loss for a housing market already in dire need of new units.
“If we’re losing affordable housing to families today, we’re losing the crisis,” said Sara Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
“It’s like a boat with a hole in the bottom,” she says.
How can we prevent the loss of affordable units?
Local governments and nonprofits can purchase expired apartments, extend affordability with new tax credits and other subsidies, and tenants can organize to force landlords and city officials to act. You can also
California now requires all new LIHTC properties to be affordable for 55 years. Expired developments built before the rule will also be prioritized for new tax credits, and the state essentially requires all LIHTC applicants to have experience owning and managing affordable housing. I’m looking for it.
California and Colorado require landlords to notify local governments and tenants before a building expires. So cities and nonprofits started buying real estate to maintain affordability.
But unlike California, many states have not extended their LIHTC agreements beyond 30 years, much less taken other steps to keep their expired housing affordable.
Still, it’s far from a guarantee that local governments and nonprofits will be able to scrape together the funds to buy the apartments. And while new tax credits could restore LIHTC’s eroding affordability, the amount is limited, given to states by the Internal Revenue Service based on population.
What happens to tenants if LIHTC units are no longer affordable?
For more than 20 years, the low rents at Marina Maalouf’s LIHTC apartments in Los Angeles’ Chinatown have been a savior for her family, including her autistic granddaughter.
Once that moratorium expired, the landlord, no longer legally obligated to keep the building affordable, raised rent from $1,100 to $2,660 in 2021, a level that Maalouf and his family could not afford. It became. Tenant protests, rent strikes, and eviction filings ensued.
The eviction case is still ongoing, and Maalouf spends her nights worried that her family will end up sleeping in a sleeping bag on a friend’s floor, or worse. In the morning she repeats the following mantra: we are still here. ”But fighting every day to make that happen is exhausting.
Still, Maalouf’s tenant activism is helping to change the situation. The city of Los Angeles has offered the landlord $15 million to keep the building affordable until 2034, but the deal does not include more than 30 ongoing eviction cases, including Maalouf’s, and the amount she owes. It won’t get rid of the $25,000 in back rent owed.
On a recent day, Maalouf’s granddaughter shuffled around the courtyard of Maalouf’s apartment, drinking a glass of water. She is 5 years old and has special needs, so her speech is spoken in broken words rather than sentences.
“So I was hoping that everything would be normal again and that she would be safe,” Maalouf said, her voice shaking with emotion. She encouraged her son to start saving money for the worst.
“We will continue to fight,” she said. “But every day is hard. …I’m already tired.”
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Bedine is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
