HUD Archives

A rent comparability study (RCS) is often required for affordable and mixed-income rental developments.

The development and preservation of affordable housing units often require funding from multiple sources. One potential funding source for affordable housing developments for the lowest-income households is the National Housing Trust Fund.

Names can outlive their purpose and their original meaning. Though the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire, a cluster of mutually distrustful principalities with a largely symbolic head of state known as the Holy Roman Emperor maneuvered under that rubric for a thousand years after its 800 AD founding by Charlemagne before it was put to sleep by the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Such may yet be the fate of two venerable concepts, Fair Market Rent (FMR) and the Area Median Income (AMI). 

Office vacancies throughout the nation have reached a 30-year high and the country is amid an affordable housing crisis. These dual inflection points have increased housing advocates’ focus on conversions of commercial real estate into housing and encouraged federal and local governments to assist in the transformations.

Since 2018, the City of Baltimore, the Housing Authority of Balti-more City (HABC), planners, architects and developers have been working on a comprehensive redevelopment of a large public housing project near the city’s famous Inner Harbor.

The needs of the public housing portfolio are well documented: annual shortfalls in Congressional funding dating back to the 1980s have contributed to an estimated capital backlog of $70 billion.

In 1998, when North Carolina Democrat-turned-Republican Lauch Faircloth added the amendment for which he became infamous, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) were in a protracted bureaucratic standoff combining the worst features of medieval sieges and the First World War.   

Launched through federal legislation in 2012, the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program, administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), has leveraged over $19.3 billion in construction investment to improve or construct over 174,000 public housing units and 53,000 Section 8, tax credit and market-rate apartments co-located in these public housing communities.

In 2021, new guidance was issued by the Department of Housing and Urban Development that allowed Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) much-enhanced structure for mixed financing methods to expand their overall supply of units.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program was a big idea: to raise money to rehabilitate crumbling old public housing properties by raising private equity and converting the buildings into project-based Section 8 developments.

In a three-decade career, Shaun Donovan has had a profound impact on shaping the public policy debate over addressing America’s affordable housing crisis.

In May 2023, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published guidelines related to its Green and Resilient Retrofit Program (GRRP).