“A Band-Aid to a Crushed Skull”
Shelterforce Refuses to Celebrate Housing Increases While Poor are Targeted
Image by PickPik
This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right on August 01, 2025
As predicted here and elsewhere, the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress’s attack on programs for the poor did not include the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program, the largest U.S. financer of cost-limited housing. Nor was the Opportunity Zones program targeted. In fact, both programs were winners in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill.
Why?
Because LIHTC benefits most the wealthy investors who receive generous tax breaks, even though the housing created is usually priced at a level that is unaffordable for our clients and other poor renters. A charitable characterization of the LIHTC program is that it is “better than nothing.” A less charitable view calls it “legalized theft of government assets”.
As for Opportunity Zones, their benefits flow so reliably to high-end housing and its investors that the Brookings Institution calls the program a “subsidy for gentrification.”
Together they perpetuate the Reverse Robin Hood approach to U.S. housing that has been the norm for over 50 years.
As the legislation was being finalized in early July, Miriam Axel-Lute, CEO and editor-in-chief of the wonderful housing publication Shelterforce, rightly pushed back on some advocates’ celebration of the expansion of LIHTC:
Certainly this bill is better with the housing provisions in it than it would be without them. And those provisions without the rest of the bill would indeed be consequential and positive.
But to imply that the passage of this bill is a net win for affordable housing is extremely shortsighted.
That’s because the $3 trillion bill’s devastating cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, enacted to free up funds for tax cuts for the ultra-rich, will bring about widespread job loss and a surge in poverty, causing the number of people who cannot afford housing to soar far beyond what the new housing provisions could address . . . (O)ne thing is clear: an expansion of LIHTC in the face of the wreckage this bill will cause is like adding a second Band-Aid to a crushed skull. To consider the bill a win is a betrayal to the people the affordable housing field serves.
Axel-Lute’s full article can be read here.
Three weeks later, Shelterforce followed up with a lengthy article by Roshan Abraham, co-published in Next City, pointing out that nearly 11 million people will likely become uninsured due to the tax law’s $1.5 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and Medicare. More than 22 million families will lose food assistance.
Abraham quotes Noëlle Porter, director of government affairs at the National Housing Law Project, saying that these targeted people already struggle for affordable housing. “I think there are a lot of people saying there are housing wins in the reconciliation package,” Porter said. “But I just see an attack on people experiencing poverty.”
Again, the full Axel-Lute article can be read here, and the full Abraham article can be read here. Shelterforce is an important nonprofit news source, and this is the latest of many examples of the publication being both independent and thorough. If so moved, you can donate to them here.
