by Sarah Abdelhadi, Dan Emmanuel, Raquel Harati, and Mackenzie Pish
The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes
NLIHC published its annual report, The Gap, on March 13, 2025. The report finds that the lowest-income renters in the U.S. face a shortage of 7.1 million affordable and available rental homes. Only 35 affordable and available homes exist for every 100 renter households with extremely low incomes across the nation. This shortage impacts every state and the District of Columbia, resulting in widespread housing cost burdens for renters with the lowest incomes.
Seventy-five percent, or three out of every four, extremely low-income renter households are severely housing cost-burdened, spending more than half their limited incomes on housing. Spending this much of one’s income on housing leaves little left over for other important necessities such as food, healthcare, transportation, and childcare. Extremely low-income renters account for 68% of severely housing cost-burdened renters in the U.S. Most extremely low- income renters either work in jobs that don’t pay a living wage or they contend with factors that limit their ability to work full time, if at all. More than 90% of extremely low-income renters are either in the labor force, are seniors, have a disability, are in school, or are single adult caregivers. Extremely low-income renters are more likely to belong to one of these income limiting categories than all other renter households.
The report emphasizes that significant federal investments are needed to assist the lowest income renters as what they can afford to pay does not cover the cost of construction and operation of private market housing. Greater investments in federal housing programs are needed to increase the supply of subsidized affordable rental housing and for housing choice vouchers to close the gap between what extremely low-income renters can afford to pay and actual rents. The report argues that budget and staffing cuts to HUD will only deepen existing affordability challenges and cause further harm to America’s lowest income renters. A bipartisan commitment to solving the affordable housing crisis is needed, instead, to ensure the wellbeing of millions of people across the country.
Visit www.nlihc.org/gap to learn more and to explore data on your community.
National Housing Preservation Database Updates
The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), in partnership with the Public and Affordable Housing Research Corporation (PAHRC), launched the National Housing Preservation Database (NHPD) in 2011 to provide tenants and housing advocates with the information they need to identify and preserve public and affordable housing. The NHPD is the only national database of federally assisted rental housing where users can access information about the different subsidies associated with any given property. Currently, the NHPD covers 80,000 active federally-assisted properties and includes subsidy information from 13 federal housing programs.
The NHPD has many uses beyond preservation. For example, it can be used to inventory the affordable housing stock in a community. It can also be used to find affordable housing and to identify which affordable housing regulations are applicable to a given federally-assisted property. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, NHPD data played a critical role in helping tenants check if their homes were covered by the CARES Act eviction moratorium. The NHPD is available for free, but users must enroll in a user account to gain access to the database.
Since its launch, the NHPD has evolved to include new data and features that equip tenants, researchers, and housing lawyers to advocate for the preservation of affordable housing and to help current tenants stay housed. Most recently, this has meant the inclusion of new data on 600 properties that were funded through the National Housing Trust Fund which was added back in February 2025. NLIHC and PAHRC are currently working on acquiring data on affordable housing located throughout the United States on tribal lands funded from the Indian Housing Block Grant (IHBG) program.
Please visit https://preservationdatabase.org/ to register for the NHPD.
National Renter Survey
While data from sources like the U.S. Census Bureau provide considerable detail on topics like rental housing quality, rent costs, and renter demographics, they include only limited information on topics like landlord-tenant relationships, barriers to applying for housing assistance, rental junk fees, and challenges faced in obtaining accessible and inclusive housing. A nationally representative source of quantitative data on the common barriers renters face to remaining safely and stably housed in their communities of choice would be an invaluable resource for informing advocacy efforts and identifying effective policy interventions.
From 2024 to 2025, NLIHC will address this information gap by conducting a nationally representative survey of renters. The primary goal of this survey is to supplement existing data sources by gathering new, actionable data to inform our advocacy on federal policies that affect renters. NLIHC is working with ICF, an experienced survey research firm, to survey thousands of renters across the U.S. online and by phone, in both English and Spanish. Renters who participate will be compensated for their time. NLIHC expects to launch the survey in late spring 2025 and to publish initial findings in winter 2025-2026.
Visit https://nlihc.org/national-renter-survey to follow the latest updates on the progress of the survey.