NAHB Estimates Number of Housing Credit Beneficiaries

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) recently released an analysis of how many people have benefitted from the LIHTC program since it was created in 1986. According to the NAHB, approximately 6.5 million low-income households, or roughly 13.3 million people, have lived in affordable apartments financed by the Housing Credit as of 2013. This estimate is the first to reflect the impacts for the primary beneficiaries of the program, the low-income households who live in the Housing Credit apartments.

The NAHB used estimated movement rates and the placed-in-service dates within each calendar year to estimate the number of households that have resided in each affordable housing credit by age of the unit. For the more than 2.1 million households for which there were data, this calculation yielded a total of 5.875 million households. Then 626,000 households for units without age data were added to come up with an estimate of just more than 6.5 million households who have lived in Housing Credit-financed homes as of 2013.

To estimate the number of people this total represents, NAHB used an estimate from the 2014 American Community Survey (ACS) for the average household size for rental multifamily homes. NAHB excluded single-family homes, which have larger household size, to be conservative. For the 2014 ACS, the average household size of rental multifamily was 2.05 people per household.

Therefore, converting the 6.5 million household count into a measure of population yielded a total of more than 13.3 million people who have resided in and benefited from housing built under the LIHTC program.