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U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) recently introduced legislation to create a middle-income housing tax credit (MIHTC) intended to encourage the development of affordable housing for Americans with moderate incomes. The bill is modeled after the LIHTC program. The legislation aims to provide a comprehensive affordable housing package in tandem with the low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC), a tool Wyden has long supported that’s helped to finance construction of affordable rental units.

U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) recently held a roundtable discussion in a Washington state county facing a housing crisis. Cantwell has been a strong advocate for the LIHTC program. This past spring, Cantwell worked with Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and others to secure a 12.5 percent increase of the 9 percent housing credit program. It’s the first increase in more than a decade and will be spread out over the next four years.

At the end of 2016, Miami developer Matthew Greer, former CEO of Carlisle Development Group, pleaded guilty to stealing $16 million from the LIHTC program and was sentenced to three years in prison. The prosecutor in the case was Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin, who has spent a number of years investigating the LIHTC program in Florida.

U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), U.S. Senator Todd Young (R-IN), and a bipartisan group of their Senate colleagues recently introduced the Task Force on the Impact of the Affordable Housing Crisis Act, which seeks to better understand and respond to America’s housing crisis by creating a bipartisan affordable housing task force. The task force created by today’s legislation would:

The LIHTC would be increased and its allocation formula adjusted under a bill recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. H.R. 6542, the Restoring Tax Credits for Affordable Housing Act, introduced by Representative James E. Clyburn (D-SC) would increase credit amounts and percentages while modifying allocation formulas including the discount rate, effective for calendar years after 2018. Rep. Clyburn also announced that he would be cosponsoring a package of affordable housing bills.

The A Call To Invest in Our Neighborhoods (ACTION) Campaign is a national, grassroots coalition of over 2,200 national, state, and local organizations and businesses calling on Congress to protect, expand, and strengthen the LIHTC program. The ACTION Campaign was established in 2009 by a broad cross-section of Housing Credit stakeholder organizations in reaction to the recession and financial crisis that rapidly and drastically affected Housing Credit investment.

HUD recently released an advance notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register. It seeks public comment on possible amendments to HUD’s 2013 final rule implementing the Fair Housing Act’s disparate impact standard. The amendments would help ensure the rule is consistent with the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project (ICP). In that case, the U.S.

Unstable housing will cost the United States $111 billion in avoidable healthcare costs and education expenditures over the next 10 years, according to research from Children’s Healthwatch, one of the nation’s leading networks of pediatricians, public health researchers, and children’s health policy experts.

The Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) recently released its annual report on federal tax expenditures, listing over 150 tax provisions that are expected to reduce federal revenue over the coming years. As in years past, the report shows the comparatively low cost of the low-income housing tax credit compared to other tax expenditures. New this year is the Opportunity Zones (OZ) incentive, created as a result of tax reform in late 2017.

Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies recently released its State of the Nation’s Housing Report. The report paints a grim picture centered around high rents, low wages, and booming wealth inequality. While the U.S. housing market has shown some improvements, such as the national homeownership rate increasing for the first time in 13 years, the report shows that many challenges still persist, especially for lower-income Americans.