The federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit: Comparison
Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Conner Chen and Version 1 by Victoria Basolo.

The federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is the largest production side-subsidy for lower-income housing in the United States.

  • LIHTC
  • low-income housing

1. Introduction

The need for affordable housing has become a tremendous problem in many countries in the last decade. In the United States, this need has been long standing, with lower-income households, in particular, struggling to find decent, affordable housing. In many U.S. metropolitan regions, housing units affordable to lower-income households are dramatically under-supplied and rent has reached extremely high levels. These conditions are especially visible in California, where the cost of land in many areas, particularly the coastal regions, makes the development of lower-income housing without significant subsidies an unrealistic endeavor.
The federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is the largest production side-subsidy for lower-income housing in the United States [1,2][1][2]. Over the last two decades, the addition of LIHTC units to the housing stock has substantially increased, and the total number of units credited to the program is approaching three million [3,4,5][3][4][5]. Clearly, LIHTC has become a critical source of capital for the production of rental housing for households with lower incomes. Given the importance of the LIHTC program to lower-income housing development, researchers and policy makers have been interested in the operation of and outcomes associated with the program [1].
Research about the LIHTC program has proliferated as this program has grown from a relatively small, temporary effort to a large, permanent program. Housing policy scholars and housing practitioners came to realize that public housing was shrinking and its trajectory was unlikely to change [6]. While it was initially criticized as inefficient, the LIHTC program gained momentum as a result of programmatic improvements to eliminate some inefficiencies and the emergence of a reliable structure of participants in the process (i.e., investors, intermediaries, developers). Moreover, the political environment favored LIHTC-subsidized housing developed by for profit and nonprofit developers compared to housing produced by the government [7]. On the last point, the LIHTC presented attractive features to liberal and conservative leaders alike in Congress. For liberal-minded policy makers, the program produced much needed housing for lower-income households and, for conservatives, it removed the government from the direct development of housing; the latter was viewed as a smaller government goal for many conservatives. Other features of the program that were likely attractive to liberals and conservatives include the allocation of credits to every state, a substantial level of discretion at the state level in shaping the program objectives, more flexibility for state and local governments, and the status of the program as “off budget”, distancing it from the line item budget arguments that impact many programs [8,9,10,11][8][9][10][11].
Many policymakers, researchers, and housing practitioners recognize the value of this program for generating capital for the production of lower-income housing. That being said, there has been concern about the location of LIHTC developments with respect to the concentration of minorities and poverty and the degree of access to services, as well as the presence or absence of other neighborhood characteristics. Research on the location of LIHTC units has increased in the last few years; however, there is far less research on the LIHTC program compared to contributions on public housing [8]. For this reason, in this article, weese content focus on the quality of LIHTC neighborhoods by investigating demographic, economic, housing, and built-environment characteristics in LIHTC neighborhoods versus non-LIHTC neighborhoods. Specifically, our central research question asks, “Which characteristics are associated with neighborhoods that contain a LIHTC development?” We look at several types of characteristics at multiple geographic levels. First, we consider all neighborhoods in California as a whole. Second, we narrow our focus to the highly urbanized County of Los Angeles. Our purposes are to determine if there are differences in select characteristics between LIHTC and non-LIHTC neighborhoods and to determine if differences change across geographic scales in California.

2. The LIHTC Program and Existing Literature

The LIHTC program came into existence over 30 years ago through the Tax Reform Act of 1986. This legislation changed the tax rules on multi-family housing in response to the potential overbuilding of luxury or higher-cost units. The less favorable rules were intended to eliminate a perceived tax shelter abuse, but some members of Congress were concerned that the legislation would also negatively impact the lower-cost, multi-family markets. The LIHTC was developed to counter this negative impact. Although the LIHTC was initially adopted as a temporary program, it has been amended over time and eventually was made permanent by Congress [1,5,12][1][5][12]. An example of an amendment to the program was the 1989 inclusion of a financial benefit for a LIHTC development located in a Qualified Census Tract (a QCT is a census tract where 50% or more of the households’ incomes are less than 60% of the Area Median Gross Income) or in a Difficult Development Area (a DDA is an area with high construction, land, and utility costs compared to the Area Median Gross Income) [13]. The LIHTC is not contained in government housing regulations, but rather appears in the Internal Revenue Code (IRC). It is referred to as a tax expenditure or “off budget” program. The federal government distributes LIHTCs to states on a per capita basis, and the states provide these credits to housing developers. According to the IRC, a state must develop a Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP), which serves as the policy guidance document for the state allocation of credits to eligible developments. States set their own priorities for the geographic distribution of credits, as well as develop a point system reflecting a range of policy goals to evaluate the merits of development proposals submitted to the state. For example, a state might give points for green building or transit-efficient locations. While the federal government offers a base framework for the LIHTC program, the states have a good degree of flexibility in setting the income limits, period of affordability, and the goals for building and location-based features [14,15,16][14][15][16]. Developers compete for tax credits and, if successful, receive an allotment of these credits from the state to sell to investors. The investors apply the tax credits against their federal tax liabilities, and the capital raised from the sale of the credits covers some of the development costs of a lower-income housing project. LIHTCs are typically one of many sources of financing for a development. They tend to be the largest contribution to the total cost of production (land cost excluded), but bank loans, direct subsidies from local government and foundations, and other sources are important as well [17,18,19][17][18][19]. LIHTC utilization has grown over time, and this growth is paralleled by an increase in LIHTC research and contributions to the scholarly, policy, and practice literature. Moreover, the focus and substance of the LIHTC literature has changed over the years, reflecting larger housing policy concerns and the interdisciplinary interest in housing research. Table 1  is a summary of the themes in LIHTC research literature over time, beginning at the start of the program and continuing through 2018. We divided tThe literature i was divided  into eight-year intervals for convenience and to highlight the increase in scholarly production over time. This table is based on a search of two databases: Google Scholar and the Web of Science, using the topic “Low-Income Housing Tax Credit”. We reviewed tThe search results and chosewas reviewed and relevant citations was choose to include in our compilation. In some cases, we only hadonly titles or abstracts to need to be reviewed, especially for older publications. Moreover, some of the articles retained in our compilation are not entirely focused on the LIHTC, but rather are comparative analyses across a range of housing programs of which the LIHTC is only one. While this search is qualitative, based on ourthe assessment of content, and not exhaustive, it achieves our goal of providing a good snapshot of the literature, including changes in themes over time.
Table 1.
 Sample of Contributions to the LIHTC Literature Over Time.

References

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