Public Housing

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have reportedly reached an agreement on nearly $2 trillion emergency relief package in response to the coronavirus pandemic, which contains:

President Trump’s Administration released the Fiscal Year (FY) 2021 budget request, “A Budget for America’s Future.” HUD is allocated $47.9 billion in funding, a 15.2 percent decrease over FY 2020 enacted levels with notable zeroing out of the HOME program, Community Development Block Grants (CDBG), Public Housing Capital Fund, Choice Neighborhoods and HOPE VI.

The Tennessee Housing Development Agency (THDA) released a $3,377,390 2020 National Housing Trust Fund Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA). The funding will go to Public Housing Authorities and nonprofit developers to implement eligible, affordable rental housing development activities, including the acquisition and/or rehabilitation of units or the new construction of units for rent to extremely low-income persons.

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the following financial services bills to support veterans, benefit investors, provide housing opportunities, hold regulators accountable, promote Minority Depository Institutions (MDIs) and improve cybersecurity:

Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act. The legislation would create seven grant programs to upgrade public housing units through decarbonization and mixed-use development and repeal the Faircloth Amendment, which prohibits new public housing units above the amount of units owned, operated or assisted by a PHA as of October 1, 1999.

Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN) introduced the Homes for All Act of 2019, which will dramatically expand the public housing stock in the U.S. and guarantee housing as a human right. The bill will authorize construction of 12 million new public housing and private, permanently affordable rental units.

House Committee on Financial Services Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) and Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) introduced the Housing is Infrastructure Act of 2019 (H.R. 5187/S. 2951). The bills contain the following investments in housing:

The Virginia Housing Development Authority (VHDA) identified public housing transformation as one of the its highest priorities and is considering the following options:

HUD published proposed revised forms of the Public Housing Authority Annual Contributions Contract (ACC) and Mixed Finance Amendment to the ACC (MFACC Amendment) for public review and comment. HUD also published a side-by-side comparison chart of the revisions to the ACC, and redline versions of the ACC and MFACC Amendment.

HUD released an evaluation of its Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD), which finds significant evidence that RAD is stimulating billions of dollars in capital investment, improving living conditions for low-income residents and enhancing the financial health of these critical affordable housing resources. The report says that the 956 RAD conversions studied leveraged $9.66 for every dollar provided through HUD’s public housing programs, that all rehabilitation projects covered their rehabilitation needs, that there is an 87 percent post-conversion decrease in unscheduled capital needs for completed RAD properties and that tenants were pleased with the improvement.

New research from Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and Lawrence Katz examines the effect of the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment on children’s long-term outcomes. Their estimates imply that moving a child out of public housing to a low-poverty area when young (at age eight on average) using a subsidized voucher like the MTO experimental voucher […]

Representative Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) introduced the Public Housing Emergency Response Act (H.R. 4546), which would authorize an additional $70 billion to HUD’s Public Housing Capital Fund. The bill claims the national public housing capital needs backlog was over $70 billion in April of 2019, including $32 billion for the New York City Housing Authority.