
One less-than-obvious but by no means less-than-important takeaway comes from a New York City report on Homelessness just released. That is the inherent weakness of Low Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTCs) as a means of creating the amount of housing stock that is needed for low/no income citizens.
The report, Our Homelessness Crisis: The Case For Change, offers some important understanding of the links between homelessness and low income housing. Its multiple proposals for providing low income housing to reduce and eventually eliminate homelessness are necessarily multi-pronged. The City is in no way the sole master, or funder, of its own affordable housing fates.
One of those ‘prongs’ is the public housing managed by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). The report views this housing as a vital component of its homelessness and affordable housing strategy. Yet its stock of public housing is eroding year by year from disrepair. To lose it entirely would be unthinkable.
So why think it? It’s the same NYCHA that last year announced it needed $25-ish billion dollars to properly refurbish its housing stock. This particular crisis-of-the-moment has been developing in plain sight for decades. However much handwringing might have been employed over the years, ultimately the necessary funding has not materialized.
One truly disturbing weakness of the federal LIHTC program is that each new LIHTC project deliberately creates a crisis-of-the-moment in the future, similar to that felt last year by the NYCHA. When tax support for LIHTC units expires, sitting tenants are pitched into a housing crisis as they can no longer afford their units.1
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see the predicament facing the NYCHA as a horrendous failure of design, implementation, management and funding from the very top on down and stretching back to inception of American public housing.
Why then implement a method of building precious affordable housing that for all intents and purposes institutionalizes a future when yet another stock of affordable homes will vanish (or at best be ‘repaired’ with an expensive new affordability contract)?
For a summary of Our Homelessness Crisis: The Case For Change read more in CITY LIMITS: Levin: City’s Approach To Homelessness Still Lacks Clarity
Footnotes
- For more on the crisis of the moment try: L.A. Eminent Domain Exposes Fatal LIHTC Affordable Housing Flaw