Taking Stock of the Nation’s Rental Housing Challenges and a Half Century of Public Policy Responses

Eric Belsky, Rachel Bogardus Drew

RR07-1: The nation faces many longstanding rental housing challenges. Chief among these concerns are widespread rental affordability problems, neighborhood decline, the spatial concentration of poor renters, and exposure to health hazards in the home. Government policies and programs designed to grapple with these challenges have led to some impressive achievements. Although housing quality problems have not been eliminated, the number and share of substandard housing units has been sharply reduced over the past 50 years (Quigley and Raphael 2004; Orr and Peach 1999). Meanwhile, many cities that were losing population in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s have started to recover population (Simmons and Lang 2001). These rebounds were at least in part aided by investments in building and rehabilitating subsidized rental housing in distressed areas (Ellen and Voicu 2006). On the affordability front, federal programs now subsidize about 1 million public housing rentals, 2 million rentals in privately owned but federally assisted properties, 1 million rentals in properties assisted by tax credits, and 2.1 million renters with vouchers. Annually, outlays for rental assistance and housing block grants top $35 billion a year and tax incentives for rental housing total about $6 billion per year. Most of those living in these subsidized rentals or receiving vouchers spend no more than 30 percent of their income on housing…