Housing & the Census

Illinois has only 36 affordable rental homes for every 100 extremely low-income households, but the 2020 census could help bring more funding for programs to meet this need, according to “The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes,” report recently released by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) and Housing Action Illinois.

Extremely low-income renter households are those with incomes at or below the poverty line, or 30 percent of Area Median Income (AMI, which is $63,575). There are 450,590 extremely low-income households in Illinois.

“We need to count every single person in Illinois – and that includes renters, students, babies, non-citizens, people experiencing homelessness, and other populations that are hard to count,” said Bob Palmer, Housing Action Illinois’s policy director. “During the last census, 1 in every 4 Illinoisans went uncounted. We can’t afford to let that happen again. For each person who goes uncounted, we leave as much as $1,800 on the table. That’s money we need to build housing, assist low-income renter households, address homelessness, fix roads, put toward health care and to do so much more.”

Vital federal programs such as the HOME program, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit and Housing Choice Vouchers support the creation of more affordable housing and all of them are pegged to the federal census taken every 10 years. According to the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy, in Fiscal Year 2016, Illinois received:

• $40 million+ for the HOME program, the largest federal block grant for non-luxury home purchase or rentals, (including demolition or site development costs) which is matched 25 percent by participating jurisdictions like Chicago.

• Nearly $346 million for the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, created by the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which issues 10-year tax credits to state agencies that generally sell them in turn to private investors to fund acquisition, rehabilitation, or new construction of rental housing – an average of 1,411 projects and 107,000 units annually between 1995 and 2017, according to the U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Qualified census tracts must have half their households earning below 60 percent of AMI or poverty rates above 25 percent.

• $926 million for the Housing Choice Voucher program, in which public housing authorities pay a subsidy directly to a landlord and the tenant pays the difference between the actual rent and the subsidy. Voucher families must pay 30 percent of their monthly adjusted gross income for rent and utilities and if the unit rent is greater than the payment standard, they must pay the additional amount, but not more than 40 percent of adjusted monthly income, according to HUD.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that vouchers supported 94,500 Illinois households in 2018.

-Suzanne Hanney, from prepared materials and online resources