HIGHLIGHTS
- The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) Program fosters affordable housing.
- But little is known about LIHTC rental housing, as data exist in multiple datasets.
- Abt is creating merged files to inform state-level and national policy decisions.
The Challenge
Through this project, Abt is taking the first steps of a larger effort to analyze and describe rental housing developed through the three-decades-old federal LIHTC program. While LIHTC databases exist, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) manages tenant and property-level datasets, which need to be merged to inform decision-making. The effort will include analysis with tenant-level data to describe the intersection of LIHTC tenant characteristics and location.
The Approach
Abt is working 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.
The Results
To date the database contains approximately 2.2 million units. Along with the merged database, Abt has created a preliminary set of descriptive and locational tables of LIHTC properties. Abt will continue to update these data. The merged database offers key insights on who the program serves and variations across and within states. Abt will continue to refine the merging algorithm in the next phase of the project and produce a research report on our findings.