NLIHC released on January 30 a new report, The National Housing Trust Fund: A Summary of 2019 State Projects. Part of NLIHC’s effort to document the impact of the national Housing Trust Fund (HTF), the report summarizes how each state and the District of Columbia planned to use $248 million allocated in 2019 by the HTF.
In 2019 – the fourth year of HTF implementation – states continued to use most of their HTF resources (74%) to target projects that served people experiencing homelessness, people with disabilities, elderly people, or other special needs populations. For example, 25% of the 2019 HTF allocation was awarded to projects serving people experiencing homelessness, 22% was awarded to projects serving elderly people, and 16% was awarded to projects serving people with disabilities.
Even in projects that did not target special needs populations, a number of HTF-assisted projects (65 projects, representing 28% of the 2019 HTF allocation) included three or more bedrooms to serve large households, a segment of the ELI population that has difficulty finding affordable housing.
Most of the 2019 HTF allocation – nearly $166 million– was used to construct new affordable housing units. Another $10 million was used for adaptive re-use projects, creating more affordable housing in properties previously used for non-housing purposes, such as vacant factories, schools, and retail or commercial properties.
Although reported to HUD as “rehabilitation,” NLIHC research showed that these projects used nearly $3.7 million to acquire, rehabilitate, and subsequently create new affordable housing. Meanwhile, $43.5 million of 2019 HTF was used to preserve existing affordable housing, helping to ensure that this stock does not revert to market-rate housing or deteriorate to the degree of becoming uninhabitable. Of that $43.5 million, more than $22.5 million was used to help preserve earlier federal investment in affordable housing through HUD’s Project-Based Section 8 program and USDA’s Rural Development (RD) Section 515 program.
The HTF remains an essential source of gap financing, used in conjunction with the HOME Investment Partnerships Program (HOME) at 62 projects, the Federal Home Loan Banks’ Affordable Housing Program (AHP) at 32 projects, state or local Housing Trust Funds at 44 projects, and other state affordable housing programs at 90 projects. The HTF was used as gap financing for 135 projects also using the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program’s equity investments in 2019, meaning that some units in LIHTC projects would serve extremely low-income households. Still, 34 projects in 20 states did not rely on LIHTC equity; in these cases, state policies tended to use HTF strategically in smaller projects not conducive to the LIHTC process.
In October 2022, NLIHC published The National Housing Trust Fund: A Summary of 2018 State Projects. Shortly before, in September 2022, NLIHC published The National Housing Trust Fund: An Overview of 2017 State Projects. In September 2018, NLIHC published a preliminary report examining the 2016 HTF awards, Getting Started: First Homes Being Built with National Housing Trust Fund Awards, later supplementing the report with additional data as more states provided the necessary information (“Supplemental Update to Getting Started”). NLIHC will continue providing reports on the HTF into the future.
Read The National Housing Trust Fund: A Summary of 2019 State Projects at: https://tinyurl.com/34tjeww4
More information about the national Housing Trust Fund is on page 3-1 of NLIHC’s 2024 Advocates’ Guide.
Information about state and local Housing Trust Funds is on page 5-43 of NLIHC’s 2024 Advocates’ Guide.
HUD’s national Housing Trust Fund webpages are at: https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/comm_planning/htf and https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/htf/