The National Low Income Housing Coalition recently released a new report, The Gap: The Affordable Housing Gap Analysis 2016, which finds that there is a shortage of 7.2 million affordable and available rental units for America’s 10.4 million extremely low-income (ELI) renter households, whose incomes are at or below 30 percent of area median income. In addition, three-quarters of ELI renters are severely cost-burdened, spending more than half of their income on rent and utilities.

The report calls for greater federal investment in ELI rental housing through the National Housing Trust Fund (NHTF) and other housing programs. New rental housing affordable to ELI households is nearly impossible to produce without subsidies, and today’s major federal affordable housing production programs allow rents that are too high for ELI renters to afford.