Affordable housing — which typically involves giving tax breaks to real estate developers — isn’t working so well. The open secret is that, all too often, it isn’t actually “affordable.” Nearly 40% of tenants using the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, for example — the largest federal program subsidizing affordable housing — are still rent-burdened, and the subsidy doesn’t require homes to be permanently “affordable,” leaving renters vulnerable to eviction.
As Peter Dreier explains in The American Prospect: “The quest to provide what has come to be called ‘affordable housing’ in America is hobbled by one fundamental reality.
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