Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) recently released its annual report, “The State of the Nation’s Housing 2019.” The report examines the state of the housing market in 2018. It found that:

Senators Todd Young (R-Ind.), Angus King (I-Maine), and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), along with a group of 13 bipartisan senators, reintroduced the Task Force on the Impact of the Affordable Housing Crisis Act, which aims to better understand and respond to America’s housing affordability crisis by creating a bipartisan housing task force. The task force would evaluate and quantify the impact of housing costs on other government programs and provide recommendations t...

Presidential candidates are increasingly focused on affordable housing. Most recently, Former HUD Secretary Julián Castro joined other presidential hopefuls, including Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), in releasing a housing plan that calls for major investments in affordable housing.

Secretary Castro’s People First Housing Plan seeks to do the following to increase the supply...

The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) recently released the 30th anniversary edition of the Out of Reach report. The report documents the gap between renters’ wages and the cost of rental housing throughout the U.S. The national Housing Wage--the hourly wage a full-time worker must earn to afford a rental home at HUD’s fair market rent without spending more than 30 percent of his or her income on housing--is $22.96 for a modest two-bedroom rental...

A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House and Senate, including Senators Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Representatives Jim Langevin (D-R.I.) and Chris Smith (R-N.J.), recently introduced the “Real Emergency Access for Aging and Disability Inclusion for Disasters Act” (REAADI) to improve disaster response and recovery for older Americans and people with disabilities.

The National Council of State Housing Agencies (NCSHA) recently sent a letter to the IRS urging it to rescind the recently released final amended compliance monitoring regulations and to work with states to develop a “workable alternative.” The new compliance monitoring final regulations replace temporary regulations (Revenue Procedure 2016-15) that had been in place since 2016.

The A Call to Invest In Our Neighborhoods (ACTION) Campaign is a coalition of over 2,200 national, state, and local organizations and businesses working to address our nation’s severe shortage of affordable rental housing by protecting, expanding, and strengthening the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. The group recently updated its national and state fact sheets on the impact of the LIHTC. Nationwide, the LIHTC has financed nearly 3.2 million rental units, providing...

A recently published study in Housing Policy Debate, “Rethinking Opportunity in the Siting of Affordable Housing in California,” found that residents’ perspectives on housing affordability, neighborhood conditions, and access to educational and economic opportunity can differ from commonly used measures.

A recent study by the Urban Institute, “Despite Labor Market Gains in 2018, There Were Only Modest Improvements in Families’ Ability to Meet Basic Needs,” found that families saw little improvement over the past year in their ability to meet basic needs despite rising employment and real wage growth.

In October 2018, the IRS published the first set of proposed regulations providing much of the direction taxpayers had been seeking. And while those regulations represented a step forward in understanding how to implement an Opportunity Zone project, many questions remained. Recently, the IRS sought to address many of those questions by publishing a second set of proposed regulations.