Housing

 AP News -   While Americans continue to struggle under unrelentingly high rents, as many as 223,000 affordable housing units ... across the U.S. could be yanked out from under them in the next five years alone.  It leaves low-income tenants caught facing protracted eviction battles, scrambling to pay a two-fold rent increase or more, or shunted back into a housing market where costs can easily eat half a paycheck...

Those affordable housing units were built with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, or LIHTC, a federal program established in 1986 that provides tax credits to developers in exchange for keeping rents low. It has pumped out 3.6 million units since then and boasts over half of all federally supported low-income housing nationwide.

“It’s the lifeblood of affordable housing development,” said Brian Rossbert, who runs Housing Colorado, an organization advocating for affordable homes...

The catch? The buildings typically only need to be kept affordable for a minimum of 30 years. For the wave of LIHTC construction in the 1990s, those deadlines are arriving now, threatening to hemorrhage affordable housing supply when Americans need it most.  “If we are losing the homes that are currently affordable and available to households, then we’re losing ground on the crisis,” said Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.