NLIHC Releases Report on State Projects Funded by the National Housing Trust Fund with their 2020 Allocations

NLIHC launched a new report on August 7, 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 $323 million allocated in 2020 by the HTF. 

In 2020 – the fifth year of HTF implementation – states continued to use most of their HTF resources (66%) to target projects that served people experiencing homelessness, people with disabilities, elderly people, or other special needs populations. For example, 29% of the 2020 HTF allocation was awarded to projects serving people experiencing homelessness, 16% was awarded to projects serving elderly people, and 14% was awarded to projects serving people with disabilities.  

Even in projects that did not target special needs populations, a number of HTF-assisted projects (76 projects) included three or more bedrooms to serve large households, a segment of the ELI population that have difficulty finding affordable housing.  

Most of the 2020 HTF allocation – $198 million (72%)– was used to construct new affordable housing units. Another $20 million was used for adaptive re-use projects, creating more affordable housing in properties previously used for non-housing purposes, such as vacant schools, motels, mills, a dormitory, a warehouse, and a former doctor’s offices.  

Although reported to HUD as “rehabilitation,” NLIHC research showed that these projects used $3.9 million to acquire, rehabilitate, and subsequently create new affordable housing. Meanwhile, $52.6 million of 2020 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 $52.6 million, $23.5 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 95 projects, the Federal Home Loan Banks’ Affordable Housing Program (AHP) at 38 projects, state or local Housing Trust Funds at 64 projects, and other state affordable housing programs at 110 projects. The HTF was used as gap financing for 167 projects also using the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program’s equity investments in 2020, meaning that some units in LIHTC projects would serve extremely low-income households. Still, 46 projects in 23 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. 

Read more about the report here.