Last week’s Antiplanner policy brief reviewed Seattle’s low-income housing program and found that it was mainly aimed at getting people to live in transit-oriented developments and did very little to help low-income families. The natural question to ask is whether this is a national problem or confined to Seattle and a few other cities. My hypothesis is that it is largely an issue in growth-management cities that are trying to get people to live in higher densities and replace cars with transit, cycling, and walking.
To help answer this question, I downloaded the Department of Housing & Urban Development’s LIHTC database, which lists 48,672 projects supported by tax credits since 1987 (click here to download the 18.9-MB data file or click the previous link to download a subset of the database). HUD seems to be behind as the database does not list any projects that were completed in 2019 or 2020.
Still, it includes a lot of information, including the address of each project, the number of units and how many are dedicated to low-income households, the tax credits allocated to each project, and whether other federal subsidies also went to the project (but not how much those subsidies were). Continue reading
