HUD Release of LIHTC Tenant Demographic Data: Not This Year or Anytime Soon that I Can See.

2008 Recovery Act legislation required state Housing Finance Agencies (HFA's) to submit LIHTC tenant demographic information to HUD (see statutory reference HERE).  The HFA submissions to HUD in the fall of 2011 was at least the second year the data was submitted to HUD.

After waiting for several months for state level summaries of tenant  demographic data from HUD, I asked HUD HQS staff this week via email and was advised that because of funding constraints HUD would NOT be doing any state level summaries of the LIHTC tenant data submitted by HFA's in the fall of 2011. (In my prior post HERE I linked project (not tenant) LIHTC data that HUD has recently updated with 2010 poverty data from ACS).

With HUD appropriations not likely better in FY 2013 than in FY 2012, it seem highly unlikely that HUD will produce summaries of LIHTC tenant demographics any time soon, rendering the statutory reporting requirement somewhat meaningless.  It also appears that HUD is out of statutory compliance with the requirement that : 

(c) Public availability: The Secretary shall, not less than annually, compile and make publicly available the information submitted to the Secretary...

With HUD's failure to post already collected LIHTC tenant demographic data, I expect the better local approach to find out who is served by LIHTC projects will be to refocus attention on getting OHCS to compile and publish state and LIHTC tenant demographic local summaries, since they are still required to submit data annually to HUD.  (My prior post on OHCS tenant data collection efforts is HERE).

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.