February 2019
As part of a Congressional request to review the federal government’s response to the 2017 hurricanes, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a performance audit report on Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds that were awarded to Texas, Florida, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico.
In March, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on improvements for HUD’s physical inspection process. The report followed a provision in the 2017 Consolidated Appropriations Act that instructed the GAO to report on the Real Estate Assessment Center’s (REAC) methods for identifying property deficiencies, selecting and training inspectors, and their oversight of these processes.
On March 14, the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) released their annual report The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes. The report finds concrete evidence of an affordable housing crisis: there is a shortage of seven million (or fewer than 4 for every 10) affordable and available rental homes for extremely low-income renters. Furthermore, no state or major metropolitan area has enough rental housing for the nation’s lowest-income individuals and families.
New research from CLPHA and Econsult Solutions shows that PHAs generate and induce multiple streams of economic activity benefitting those who reside in public housing, as well as local employers, governments, and industries. Read more about "The Economic Impact of Public Housing: Ongoing Investment with Wide Reaching Returns" here.
This Worst Case Housing Needs report is the sixteenth in a longstanding series providing national data and analysis of the critical problems facing very low-income renting families. Households with worst case needs are defined as very low-income renters who do not receive government housing assistance and who paid more than one-half of their income for rent, lived in severely inadequate conditions, or both. The report draws on data from the 2015 American Housing Survey (AHS), which debuted a major redesign that included a new national and metropolitan area longitudinal sample.
Public housing agencies (PHAs) have struggled heroically to maintain the country’s 1.1 million public housing units, but the backlog of capital needs has grown to $26 billion, and there is little hope today that federal resources will rise to meet it. Congress authorized the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) in 2012 to meet this funding challenge.
Public housing occupies a unique and essential place on the affordable housing spectrum. It is home to about 2.2 million lowincome families, seniors and people with disabilities. A multibillion dollar asset, public housing authorities’ (PHAs) spending on operations and capital improvements also generates significant economic activity.