Mayors Ask Congress to Include AHCIA in Year-End Tax Legislation

A bipartisan group of 45 mayors from communities in 19 states and the District of Columbia recently sent a letter to Congressional leaders calling for the addition of the Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act of 2019 (AHCIA) in any year-end legislative tax package. The letter said the LIHTC is our nation’s primary tool for encouraging private investment in affordable rental housing. And the AHCIA would help strengthen and expand the highly effective Housing Credit, resulting in more than half a million additional affordable homes nationwide over the next decade.

The key provisions reintroduced in the AHCIA of 2019 include the following:

• Increase LIHTC allocations by 50 percent, phased in over five years, to help meet the vast and growing need for affordable housing;
• Enact a minimum 4 percent rate to parallel the minimum 9 percent rate already enacted, providing predictability to the marketplace and substantially increasing production by making more developments financially feasible;
• Enable the LIHTC to better serve hard-to-reach communities including rural, Native American, high-poverty, and high-cost communities, as well as extremely low-income tenants; and
• Make the LIHTC a more effective tool for preserving the nation’s existing affordable housing inventory by simplifying and aligning rules.