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Rental Housing Results from Low-Income Housing Tax Credits

HIGHLIGHTS

  • The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) Program is the largest federal program providing capital funds to develop affordable housing.
  • But little is known about LIHTC rental housing, as data are in multiple datasets.
  • Abt has created a Merged LIHTC Database to inform state-level and national policy decisions.

The Challenge

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) manages separate household and property-level datasets on LIHTC.  Merging those datasets to create a complete picture of units supported by LIHTC and their residents requires an extensive effort that combines property identifiers, addresses, and other data.  No one had done that before.  

The Approach

Abt worked with HUD on data use agreements, data harmonization, anomalies, and missing data. This first phase of the project involved obtaining the data, assessing its quality, refining a set of research questions, and creating a merging algorithm. 

Supported by grants from philanthropy, Abt used extensive data matching protocols to create a Merged LIHTC Database that can support analysis at the national and state levels. The database provides a snapshot of the LIHTC program as of 2021 and includes approximately 2.2 million units.

The Results

Along with the merged database, Abt has created a preliminary set of descriptive and locational tables of LIHTC properties.The merged database offers key insights on who the program serves and variations across and within states. Abt has also produced a report that uses the data to describe the incomes of LIHTC residents, the affordability of their housing, the types of households living in LIHTC units, and the locations of the units.