LOS ANGELES — For more than two decades, the low rent of Marina Maalouf’s apartment in a blocky, affordable neighborhood in Los Angeles’s Chinatown was a lifesaver for her family, including a granddaughter who has autism.
But that grace had an expiration date. For Maalouf and her family it came in 2020.
The landlord, no longer legally obligated to keep the building affordable, increased the rent in 2021 from $1,100 to $2,660 – beyond the reach of Maalouf and her family. Maalouf’s nights are haunted by the fear that her years-long deportation battle will end in sleeping bags on a friend’s floor or worse.
While the Americans continue to struggle unrelentingly high rentsas many as 223,000 affordable housing units like Maalouf’s in the US could be torn out out from under them in the next five years alone.
It leaves low-income tenants face protracted eviction battles, rushing to pay a two-fold rent increase or more, or returning to a housing market where costs can easily eat up half a paycheck.
These affordable homes are built with the Low income tax creditor LIHTC, a federal program established in 1986 that provides tax breaks to developers in exchange for keeping rents low. Since then, 3.6 million homes have been sold and the country has more than half of all federally assisted low-income housing nationwide.
“It’s the lifeblood of affordable housing development,” said Brian Rossbert, head of Housing Colorado, an organization that advocates for affordable housing.
That lifeblood is not strictly red or blue. By combining social benefits with tax breaks and private ownership, LIHTC has enjoyed bipartisan support. Its expansion is now the focus for the Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ housing plan build 3 million new homes.
The catch? The buildings usually only have to be kept affordable for a minimum of 30 years. For the wave of LIHTC construction in the 1990s, those deadlines are now approaching, threatening to wipe out the supply of affordable housing just when Americans need it most.
“If we lose the homes that are currently affordable and available to households, then we will lose ground to the crisis,” said Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
“It’s like having a boat with a hole in the bottom,” she said.
Not all units that mature from LIHTC become market rate. Some are kept affordable by other government subsidies, by compassionate landlords or by states, including California, Colorado and New York, that have worked to keep them cheap by relying on various levers.
Local governments and nonprofits can purchase expiring apartments, new tax breaks can be implemented that increase affordability, or, as in Maalouf’s case, tenants can organize to force action from landlords and city officials.
These options face challenges. While new tax credits can restore a dilapidated LIHTC property, they are limited and are distributed to states by the Internal Revenue Service based on population. It’s also a tall order for local governments and nonprofits to spend enough money to keep declining developments affordable. And there is little collected data on when exactly LIHTC units will lose affordability, making it difficult for policymakers and activists to fully prepare.
There is also less political incentive to maintain the units.
“Politically, you are rewarded for an announcement, a groundbreaking, a ribbon cutting,” said Vicki Been, a professor at New York University and formerly New York City’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development.
“You are not rewarded for being a good steward of your assets and keeping track of everything and making sure you don’t lose any affordable housing,” she said.
Maalouf stood in the courtyard of her apartment on a recent warm day, chatting and waving to neighbors, a bracelet with a photo of Che Guevarra dangling from her arm.
“Friendly,” is how Maalouf described her former self, but not assertive. That is until rent increases landed her before the Los Angeles City Council for the first time, sweat beading as she fought for her home.
Now an organizer with the LA Tenants’ Union, Maalouf isn’t afraid to speak up, but fear about her home still keeps her up at night. In the morning she repeats a mantra: ‘We are still here. We’re still here.” But fighting day in and day out to make it happen is exhausting.
Maalouf’s apartment was built before California set LIHTC contracts for 55 years instead of 30 in 1996. About 5,700 LIHTC units built around Maalouf’s time are set to expire over the next decade. In Texas that is 21,000 units.
When California Treasurer Fiona Ma took office in 2019, she focused the program on developers committed to affordable housing rather than what she called “churn and burn,” where they bought up LIHTC properties and brought them to market as quickly as possible.
In California, landlords must notify state and local governments and tenants before their building expires. Housing groups, nonprofits, and state or local governments then first tried to buy the property to keep it affordable. Expiring developments are also prioritized for new tax credits, and the state essentially requires all LIHTC applicants to have experience owning and managing affordable housing.
“It has kind of weeded out people who weren’t interested in affordable housing in the long term,” said Marina Wiant, executive director of the California Tax Credit Allocation Commission.
But unlike California, some states have not extended LIHTC agreements beyond thirty years, let alone taken other measures to keep expiring housing affordable.
Colorado, which has about 80,000 LIHTC units, passed a law this year giving local governments the right of first refusal in hopes of preserving 4,400 units that will lose affordability protections over the next six years. The law also requires landlords to give local and state governments a two-year notice before the term expires.
Still, it’s far from a guarantee that local governments or nonprofits will scrape together the money to buy large apartment buildings.
Stories like Maalouf’s will continue to play out as LIHTC units turn around and threaten to send families with meager resources back into the housing market. According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the median income of Americans living in these units in 2021 was just $18,600.
“This looks like a math problem,” said Rossbert of Housing Colorado. “Once any of these units expire and are converted to market rate and a household is displaced, they become part of the need that drives the need for new construction.”
“It’s hard to get out of that cycle,” he says.
Colorado’s housing agency works with groups across the state on conservation efforts and has a fund to help. Still, it’s unclear how many LIHTC units can be saved, in Colorado or nationwide.
It’s even difficult to know how many units expire nationally. An accurate accounting would require sifting through the constellation of municipal, state and federal grants, each with their own affordability requirements and end dates.
That could be a key to policymakers and advocates’ ability to fully understand where and when many units will lose affordability, and then direct resources to the right places, said Kelly McElwain, who manages and oversees the National Housing Preservation Database stops. It is the most comprehensive collection of LIHTC data nationally, but despite all the gaps, it remains a rough estimate.
There is also concern that if states announce their expiring LIHTC units, for-profit buyers with no interest in keeping them affordable would strike.
“It’s kind of a catch-22: trying to understand the problem and not putting up a big for-sale sign in front of a property right before it expires,” Rossbert said.
Meanwhile, Maalouf’s tenant activism has moved the needle in Los Angeles. The city has offered the landlord $15 million to keep her building affordable through 2034, but that deal would not end more than 30 pending eviction cases, including Maalouf’s, or the $25,000 in back rent she owes .
In her courtyard, Maalouf’s granddaughter, Rubie Caceres, shuffled by with a glass of water. She is 5 years old, but because she has special needs, her speech consists more of single words than sentences.
“That’s why I’ve been hoping that everything will return to normal and that she can be safe,” Maalouf said, her voice shaking with emotion. She has urged her son to start saving money for the worst.
“We will keep fighting,” she said, “but day after day it is difficult.”
“I’m already tired.”
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Bedayn reported from Denver.
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Bedayn is a corps member of The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.