A new report focused on how the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) can be improved for the preservation of housing units has been published by NLIHC and PAHRC. The report highlights how improvements to the quality of property-level LIHTC data, as well as public access to that data, would better support the identification of properties in need of preservation.
While HUD’s public LIHTC database is an essential resource, it does not incorporate data critical to assessing preservation risks, such as restriction end dates, qualified contract (QC) waivers, and information on ownership changes. The report notes that 93% of Housing Finance Agencies (HFAs) already collect some data at the state and local levels, but not the property-level preservation indicators. The report identifies several other types of property-level data that, if collected, would ease the process of identifying properties in need of preservation.
The authors conducted a comprehensive review of HFAs in all 50 states and the District of Columbia and conducted interviews with HFA staff from 25 states. The publicly available property-level data posted by HFAs are mostly limited to data that is also already available on HUD’s LIHTC database. Many HFAs are facing limitations in staff capacity and technology to improve their data collection and reporting, and limited oversight and enforcement power limit HFAs’ ability to collect necessary property-level LIHTC data that would be valuable for preservation.