As our most recent State of the Nation’s Housing report confirms, the renter affordability crisis shows no signs of abating, with more than one in four renters spending over 50 percent of their income on housing in 2012. With the Great Recession pushing up the number of very low-income households that qualified for rental assistance by 3.3 million between 2007 and 2011 (a 21 percent increase), the number of available subsidized rental units has not kept pace—the share of eligible households able to secure aid dropped from 27 percent to 24 percent over this period.
Given the growing demand for subsidized rental housing, preserving the existing stock of affordable housing has become critical. In our report, we analyzed data from the National Housing Preservation Database to determine what types of federally subsidized units with assistance tied to them are particularly vulnerable to loss over the next decade, due to expiring contract or affordable-use restrictions.
via Housing Perspectives (from the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies).
