Executive Summary
The future of our housing system must be one that works for everyone. To that end, tenants, organizers and advocates are working towards a system of social housing. Social housing is permanently and deeply affordable, permanently removed from the for-profit market, and owned and controlled by public, non-profit, or community entities, or the tenants themselves. This model effectively addresses a root cause of our housing emergency — a system that puts profit over people, characterized by runaway rents and a lack of housing stability that low-income renters face. To fully realize a widespread social housing system, we will need permanent, consistent, and direct not-for-profit funding sources that are tailored to meet our principles for social housing development, acquisition, and maintenance. In the meantime, we can and should work to move major funding resources towards our social housing goals.
The Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, by far the largest single federal expenditure on affordable housing construction and rehabilitation, currently follows the ‘profit over people’ way of building housing. Consequently, LIHTC produces housing that is only temporarily affordable, not well-targeted to the neediest households, and majority-owned by for-profit developers and investors.
Still, we can reform LIHTC state by state to help produce outcomes more in-line with social housing goals by advocating for changes in state Qualified Allocation Plans (QAPs) — state documents outlining criteria and priorities for LIHTC projects — to require, for instance, permanent and deeper affordability, stronger tenant protections, and ultimately, property transfer from LIHTC’s for-profit investors to fully effective public, non-profit, or community ownership.
LIHTC can be improved, even as we work to create more direct funding structures. By modifying state QAPs, which set rules for expenditure of LIHTC funds, we can steer these dollars towards advancing our vision of social housing as much as possible. This toolkit is intended to give tenants, organizers, advocates, and policymakers the basics on why and how to update your state’s QAP.
About the Authors
The Alliance for Housing Justice is a coalition that came together to address the nation’s affordable housing and displacement crisis, advance the rights of tenants, respond to harmful public policy actions, and shift the narrative from housing as a commodity to housing as a human right. Our primary strategy for achieving these goals is building and supporting the infrastructure needed for a powerful, grassrootsled housing justice movement.
The Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) is a civil rights law and policy organization based in Washington, DC, and a founding member of AHJ. Their mission is to promote research-based advocacy strategies to address structural inequality and change the systems that disadvantage low-income people of color.
Primary Authors
Audrey Lynn Martin, PRRAC; Jasmine Rangel, PolicyLink; Liz Ryan Murray, Public Advocates Editors Emily Wheeler, Public Advocates; Dave Pringle, PRRAC; Amee Chew, Center for Popular Democracy
Special Thanks To Readers, Editors, and Advisors:
Marcos Segura, National Housing Law Project Ryan Curren, Race Forward Jesse Fairbanks, CLASP Rae Huang, Housing Now! Chris Schildt, Urban Habitat Tram Hoang, PolicyLink sydney kopp-richardson, SAGE Josh Dubensky, SAGE
We would also like to thank the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for their support of the research initiative that made this toolkit possible
You must be logged in to post a comment.