TOOLKIT FOR ADVOCATES & STATE OFFICIALS
Moving LIHTC Towards
Social Housing:
A QAP Toolkit
Alliance for Housing Justice & Poverty & Race Research Action Council created this guide to help advocates & state officials shape how Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) dollars are spent to secure deeper affordability, better tenant protections & more community control.
Learn how to use your state’s Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP) to turn an imperfect federal program into a tool for housing justice and align public spending with the basic principles of social housing.
Executive Summary
The future of our housing system must be one that works for everyone.​
To that end, tenants, organizers, and advocates are working towards a system of social housing.
Social housing is permanently and deeply affordable, permanently removed from the for-profit market, and owned and controlled by public, non-profit, or community entities, or the tenants themselves.
This model effectively addresses a root cause of our housing emergency—a system that puts profit over people, characterized by runaway rents and housing instability for low-income renters .
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To fully realize a widespread social housing system, we'll need permanent, consistent, and direct not-for-profit funding sources tailored to meet our principles for social housing development, acquisition, and maintenance. In the meantime, we can and should work to move major funding resources toward our social housing goals.
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The LIHTC program, by far the largest single federal expenditure on affordable housing construction and rehabilitation, currently follows the ‘profit over people’ way of building housing.​​​​​
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Through QAP reform, states can require:
✅ Permanent and deeper affordability
✅ Stronger tenant protections
✅ Property transfer from for-profit investors to public, non-profit, or community ownership​​​​​
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LIHTC can be improved, even as we work to create more direct funding structures.
By modifying state QAPs, which set rules for the expenditure of LIHTC funds, we can steer these dollars toward advancing our vision of social housing as much as possible.
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This toolkit is intended to give tenants, organizers, advocates & policymakers the basics on why and how to update your state’s QAP.
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