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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.
How many affordable units could be lost in the coming decades?
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.
What can be done to stop the loss of affordable units?
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.
California now requires all new LIHTC properties to be affordable for 55 years. Expiring developments built before that rule are also prioritized for new tax credits, and the state essentially requires that all LIHTC applicants have experience owning and managing affordable housing.
California and Colorado require landlords to notify local governments and tenants before their building expires. Cities and nonprofits then have first shot at buying the property to keep it affordable.
However, unlike California many states haven’t extended LIHTC agreements beyond 30 years, let alone taken other measures to keep expiring housing affordable.
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.
What happens to tenants when their LIHTC unit loses affordability?
For more than two decades, the low rent on Marina Maalouf’s LIHTC apartment in Los Angeles’ Chinatown was a saving grace for her family, including a granddaughter who has autism.
When that grace expired, the landlord, no longer legally obligated to keep the building affordable, hiked rent from $1,100 to $2,660 in 2021 — out of reach for Maalouf and her family. Tenant protests, a rent strike and eviction filings followed.
The eviction case is ongoing, haunting Maalouf’s nights with fears of her family ending up in sleeping bags on a friend’s floor or worse. Mornings she repeats a mantra: “We still here. We still here.” But fighting day after day to make it true is exhausting.
Still, Maalouf’s tenant activism has helped move the needle. The City of Los Angeles has offered the landlord $15 million to keep her building affordable through 2034, but that deal wouldn’t get rid of over 30 eviction cases still proceeding, including Maalouf’s, or the $25,000 in back rent she owes.
On a recent day in the courtyard of Maalouf’s apartment, her granddaughter shuffled up with a glass of water. She is 5 years old, but with special needs, her speech is more disconnected words than sentences.
“That’s why I’ve been hoping everything becomes normal again, and she can be safe,” said Maalouf, her voice shaking with emotion. She has urged her son to start saving money for the worst.
“We’ll keep fighting,” she said, “but day by day it’s hard. ... I’m tired already.”
