On Thursday, July 3, Congress passed a reconciliation bill that included a number of provisions that impact affordable housing and community development, including a permanent 12% increase to the low income housing tax credit (LIHTC). You can read more about these provisions in our detailed breakdown of the bill. The inclusion of these provisions is a direct result of a decade of the Housing Coalition’s work building bipartisan support for the Affordable Housing Credit Improvement Act. While these provisions are important and we would normally celebrate their passage, sadly they were included in a much larger bill that will ultimately do harm to more North Carolinians than these provisions will help. As Senator Thom Tillis (R) noted in his statement, this will “force the state to make painful decisions like eliminating Medicaid coverage for hundreds of thousands.” Congresswoman Deborah Ross (D) also noted that the, ”legislation guts the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by 20 percent, the largest cut in our nation’s history.”
The mission of the North Carolina Housing Coalition is to lead a movement to ensure that every North Carolinian has a home in which to live with dignity and opportunity. What the Coalition knows best is housing policy, but we also know that stable housing, financial security, and opportunity for families at the lowest end of the income spectrum is about much more than housing costs. Marginally increasing the number of units that the low income housing tax credit can produce a year while potentially stripping health care from more than 670,000 North Carolinians and cutting food assistance hurts our state. Ultimately, when combined with the North Carolina General Assembly’s failure to pass a budget that includes gap financing through the Workforce Housing Loan Program, this federal increase in the LIHTC may not even result in more units.
