The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program (LIHTC), managed by the Department of Treasury's Internal Revenue Service, is currently the largest source of federal subsidy for adding new or rehabilitated rental housing units to the affordable housing stock in the United States. Between 1987 and 2000, equity raised through the tax credit program facilitated the creation or rehabilitation of over 1.1 million housing units affordable to persons and families with incomes at or below 60 percent of HUD Area Median Family Income. Congress recently increased each state's annual per capita tax credit allocation by 40 percent, which should cause annual production to increase significantly in the next two to three years.

The Qualified Allocation Plan is a federally mandated planning requirement that states annually use to explain the basis upon which they distribute their LIHTC allocations. Based on their QAP, states establish preferences and set-asides within their tax credit competitions so as to target the credits towards specific places (such as rural areas) or types of people (such as elderly households). Analysis of State Qualified Allocation Plans for the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program examines how those preferences and set-asides were used and changed based on content analysis of 1990 and 2000 Qualified Allocation Plans from nearly every state along with discussions with the staff that prepared the plans.

This report continues a 25-year PD&R tradition of conducting research on housing planning requirements. It also marks one more addition to HUD's expanding library of information about the LIHTC program. This report is being released simultaneously with a complementary report on housing planning: Planning to Meet Local Housing Needs: The Role of HUD's Consolidated Planning Requirements in the 1990s. Both reports review the implementation of federally mandated planning requirements in the 1990s. This report looks at state prepared Qualified Allocation Plans (QAPs) for the LIHTC program, while the other looks at locally prepared Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategies (CHAS)/Consolidated Plans that carry out the purposes of the National Affordable Housing Act.