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HUD Updates Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Database

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The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) database,
created by HUD and available to the public since 1994,
has been updated and now contains information on more
than 24,500 projects and nearly 1,257,000 housing units
placed in service between 1987 and 2003. The LIHTC is one
of the most important resources for creating affordable
housing in the United States today. The revised national
database provides a comprehensive project-level look at
LIHTC housing production.

Created by the Tax Reform Act of 1986, the LIHTC program
gives states the equivalent of nearly $5 billion in
annual budget authority to issue tax credits for the
acquisition, rehabilitation, or new construction of
rental housing targeted to lower-income households.
Although some data about the program have been made
available through various sources, HUD's database is the
only complete national source of information on the size,
unit mix, and location of individual projects. Through
continuing support of the national LIHTC database, HUD
hopes to enable researchers to learn more about the
effects of the tax credit program.

The database includes project addresses, number of units
and low-income units, number of bedrooms, year the credit
was allocated, year the project was placed in service,
whether the project was new construction or rehab, type
of credit provided, and other sources of project
financing. The database has been geocoded, enabling
researchers to look at the geographical distribution and
neighborhood characteristics of tax credit projects. It
may also help show how incentives to locate projects in
low-income areas and other underserved markets are
working.

New enhancements in this database update include: data on
the interaction of the LIHTC with other HUD project-based
subsidy programs, including FHA mortgage insurance, HOME
and CDBG funds, and HOPE VI; data on project targeting to
special needs populations; and limited information on
whether projects initially funded by the LIHTC are still
being monitored for compliance with LIHTC program
guidelines. The new data on HUD subsidies and targeting
are generally available only for projects placed in
service in 2003, with some limited coverage of earlier
years.

Data are available through the LIHTC Database Access
website at http://lihtc.huduser.gov/.  In addition to
downloading the entire database, users may extract more
limited sets of data by selecting only the variables of
interest to them, and by filtering for variable values or
restricting the geographic extent of their query.

A companion report analyzing the latest data is available
at https://www.huduser.gov/datasets/lihtc/report9503.pdf.

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