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).
The tax credits listed are supposed to be annual and to last for 10 years, so multiply by 10 to get the total subsidy from the LIHTC program. However, there seem to be some entry errors, as one project supposedly received $120,000,000 in annual credits or a total of $1.2 billion for 47 low-income housing units. That’s a total of $25.5 million per subsidized unit, which seems a bit high. While it’s possible, it is more likely that some entered the entire ten-year credit, but even that would make the subsidy $2.55 million per unit. Such entry errors seem to be mainly in a few states, especially Kentucky, New York, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.
The second thing to note is that subsidies per unit have greatly increased since the program began in 1987. In the United States as a whole, subsidies per unit have grown from $2,500 per unit in the first three years of the program to $16,200 in the last three years. After adjusting for inflation using the Census Bureau’s construction cost indices, subsidies have more than tripled from $5,300 to $16,200.
Some of this may be due to the coding errors mentioned above, but subsidies have grown even in states that don’t seem to have any entry errors. However, they haven’t grown everywhere. Washington has seen subsidies grow by nearly nine times. At the other extreme, subsidies in Texas haven’t grown at all. Washington is a growth-management state and Texas is not, but many states of both types, including Oregon, Hawaii, and California on the growth-management side and Arkansas, North Carolina, and Wyoming on the non-growth-management side, have seen subsidies double, so there isn’t a clear pattern.
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Most other states have followed suit. American Samoa still uses tax credits for single-family homes, but the last state to do so appears to have been Kentucky, which funded one that was completed in 2001. North Carolina funded hundreds of such homes in the 1990s but none since 2000.
California funded one single-family home in 1996, but other than that none since 1991. Washington lists only three single-family homes in the entire history of the program, all of which were in 1987 or 1988. This is something else that I could blame on the growth-management mentality but even Texas hasn’t funded any single-family homes since 1992. I wonder if both developers and the states realized there would be less red tape per unit if the funds were used only for multifamily housing.
On a per-square-foot basis, mid-rise (4 to 6 stories) and high-rise costs more than low-rise housing, so states that favor transit-oriented developments would see higher costs than ones that continued to favor low-rise housing. I looked up a sample of projects on Google streetview and the ones I found in Portland and Seattle were just about all mid- or high-rises, while the ones I found in Texas were just about all two-stories tall. That may help explain why Texas has been able to contain costs per unit.
Nearly all of the projects I found in Seattle were built by non-profit groups and the remainder were built by government housing bureaus. Nationwide, however, non-profits make up a minority of projects. About 8,300 were coded non-profit while 30,500 were coded not non-profit (the remainder had no entry in this field).
My next step will be to look at individual urban areas as I did Seattle. I’m particularly interested in Denver, Houston, San Antonio, and San Jose. If any reader is from one of those urban areas and would have time to help me track down data from projects in those areas, please let me know.
The push for non-SFH is likely ideological. Also, does this data refer to rental or owner occupied housing? Regardless it would be good to see costing models of various scenarios. My guess from what I have seen is that agencies and contractors can bank more on MF than SF. One other data point that might be useful to look at is long term differences between subsidizing people to get into owner occupied housing verses rental housing.