The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit is another well meaning, but poor thought out attempt to procure low income housing. In practice, it has greatly impeded the construction and availability of low income housing.
Excessively bureaucratic and structured so as to encourage developers to inflate costs. This tax credit needs to be repealed.
If your want to really solve the housing crisis, the solution is to roll back exclusionary zoning and exclusionary housing rules. Switch to medium and high density zoning, allow housing in unused commercial districts, eliminate off street parking requirements, reduce minimum lot sizes, reduce minimum house sizes, etc. Also, allow accessory dwelling units to be constructed when possible on existing single family lots.
Community Development Block Grants (CDBG)
Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP)
Housing Choice Voucher Program Section 8
Project-based Rental Assistance Program
McKinney Act Programs
Section 202 Supportive Housing for the Elderly Program
Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS (HOPWA) Program
Section 811 Supportive Housing for Persons with Disabilities
Low Income Housing Tax Credits
U.S. Department of Agriculture Housing Assistance programs
Self-help Homeownership Opportunity Program
Housing Trust Fund (HTF)
Opportunity Zones (OZ) Program
I got this list of housing programs/subsidies from HUD itself.
Most are ineffective at best. The Low Income Housing Tax Credit just happens to be the most actively harmful of these.
As I said in the OP, State and local restrictions on housing supply must be wiped away.
And there is nothing that HUD can do in that regard.
1,042 square feet, yet manages to squeeze 2 beds, 2 1/2 baths, living room, dining room and kitchen into that small space. And the house can fit into a very small lot, allowing for high density single family. Very cheap to construct, but also very illegal in many jurisdictions due to minimum square foot requirements and garage requirements.
No disagreement here. Our zoning laws tend to work in reverse.
Ostensibly designed to protect nature or some such their real effect is to chew up a lot of nature per house
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As for tax credits
Tax credits are a great idea, but there are too many bureaucrats in Washington.
What could be a one-page law “all income relating to the construction of homes which will sell or rent for less than 80% of the are media are hereby tax-exempt.”
is turned over to a Monty Python sketch of unelected agencies who mandate a a behemoth series of “If you are going to apply for a tax rebate certificate you must first do this and get this approval, then do that and get that certification but only after meeting the 16 other requirements we added. etc.”
Nearly 1-in-6 people work for the government and nearly every position is designed to prevent people from doing ‘A’ ever
or
prevent people from doing ‘B’ unless and until they prove this that and the other thing.
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The developers must cap rents for the units they set aside for low‐income tenants. The states submit qualified allocation plans (QAPs) to the federal government, which micromanage LIHTC allocations and housing projects in huge detail. Virginia’s QAP and related 238‐page manual here give a sense of the intense bureaucracy. LIHTC rules are so complex that one guidebook spans 1,790 pages.
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They could keep it really simple
“all income relating to the construction of homes which will sell or rent for less than 80% of the area median are hereby tax-exempt.”
Boom! the intent of the law is filled.
and thousands of stay-at-home government employees can finally be fired
2023 General Schedule for areas without a higher locality adjustment.
All those grades are well below their equivalencies in the private sector.
Even at the very top.
An agency staff attorney would be a GS-15. Not even close to the equivalent as a corporate counsel, which would generally START at around $190,000 and potentially could rise in to the $300,000 range.
GS-5 (entry level professional in several fields) maxes out well below the equivalent private sector job.
If your looking for job security, look to the civil service. If your looking for competitive salary, go to the private sector.
Naturally, what bothers me is not the suburbs, but the fact that nothing else is allowed.
Any involvement at all with the process of suburban developments and construction, and one quickly sees a repeated pattern of the free market trying to build with higher and higher densities (homes per acre,) and local governments requiring them to chew-up more land per home.
if one wants to live on top of other people, one can do that…
the fact that we have great expanses of land available for purchase and development allows one to live where they wish…
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There should be zero doubt. If the free market could do what the free market wants to do, expensive beach front high rises would replace these suburban home wannabes faster than you can ask “What’s the latest interest rate?”
While those particular homes would be expensive, the overall supply-and-demand equation means overall housing prices would come down.
The very fact the this block exists (and millions others like it) is a monument to the fact that
–when it comes to environmental protection, and
–when it comes to housing supply
government is the problem, and the free market is the solution
Zoning is one of those issues where supposedly free market types suddenly turn all big government. There is also the issue of tax revenues.
After World War II, Americans got this idea that a one on a 1/5 to 1/4 of an acre with a lush green lawn was a sign of success.
Localities liked it better, because they could squeeze more tax revenue per property.
And race conscious people, which included a great deal of the population, not just overt racists, liked that zoning kept the “wrong” type of people out of neighborhoods. In fact, the first zoning codes in the nation were overtly racially based.
But now, the middle class has been hoisted on its own zoned petard. Their children are being excluded from their parent’s type of neighborhoods, due to the very effects of zoning the parents championed.
Free market principle DEMANDS that people be able to use their property as they wish, with minimal regulation.
For example, minimal zoning to cluster industrial away from residential would be just fine. But when it gets beyond the minimal purpose of effecting basic health and safety standards, it becomes abusive.
Most zoning today is abusive and should be wiped from the books.
I’d rather say that wealthy suburbanites (who are normally pro-free market) are split on the issue. Right now it’s cool for both the left and right to bash zoning laws but umm, it certanly was not that way a short time ago.
