Affordable Housing Finance

HUD Awards $3.16 Billion to Public Housing Authorities

The funding will go toward modernizing public housing across the country.

(WASHINGTON, DC February 22nd, 2023) The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced $3.16 billion in funding to nearly 2,770 public housing authorities (PHAs) in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The grants will be used to make important capital investments in the public housing stock.

“As I have traveled the country, I’ve heard time and again from families and seniors in public housing that a decent home in a safe community shouldn’t be too much to ask for,” said HUD secretary Marcia L. Fudge in a statement. “With this investment today, we are committing to work with our public housing authority partners to guarantee homes in public housing are worthy of the families and individuals who live there.”

The grants are provided through HUD’s Capital Fund program, which offers annual funding to PHAs to build, renovate, and/or modernize the public housing in their communities. Housing authorities can use the funding to complete large-scale improvements, such as replacing roofs or making energy-efficient upgrades to heating systems and installing water conservation measures.

WASHINGTON, May 16 2022 – The United States Government announced a Housing Supply Action Plan to ease the burden of housing costs over time by boosting the supply of quality housing in every community. The plan includes both legislative and administrative actions to help close the nation’s housing supply shortfall in five years. Among other provisions, the plan includes: test

• Financing over 800,000 affordable rental units by expanding and strengthening LIHTC through enactment of provisions included in the House-passed reconciliation bill. The bill would increase tax credit allocations, provide additional capacity for private activity bonds to finance affordable housing, target tax credits for housing that serves extremely low-income Americans, and make it easier to produce and preserve affordable housing with tax credits in Indian Country.
• Providing an additional subsidy through the LIHTC to developments that add net new supply and that would otherwise not be financially feasible. This proposal was included in the FY 2023 budget.
• Strengthening Government-Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) financing for multifamily development and rehabilitation.
• Leveraging American Recue Plan funds for investments in affordable housing.
• Finalizing the LIHTC Income Averaging proposed guidance by the end of September 2022.
• Advancing HOME as a key tool for the production and preservation of affordable rental and homeownership housing.
• Providing tax credits to build and rehabilitate homes for low- and moderate-income homebuyers. This proposed legislation, the Neighborhood Homes Investment Act (NHIA), is included in the House-passed reconciliation bill.
• Improving the alignment of federal funds to reduce transaction costs and duplications and accelerate development.
• Supporting the construction of more than 8,000 rural multifamily housing units.
• Supporting new and existing affordable housing in Indian Country.
• Providing incentives for land use and zoning reforms and reducing regulatory barriers.
• Addressing supply chain disruptions for building materials.

South Carolina has joined seventeen other states by enacting a state based affordable housing program that mirrors the federal LIHTC. The goal is to add critically needed affordable housing to workforce and income restricted seniors.

Calling it the “Workforce and Senior Affordable Housing Act” and signed into law on May 14, 2020, the program will be administered with the intention of being as robust as other successful state based LIHTC plans.    

Until the Act was passed, Georgia stood alone as having the only state-based low income tax credit plan in the Southeast.

More news to come as the office in Columbia is staffed up.