Affordable Housing Supply
Faced with limited housing supply and soaring rents and home prices, more people, particularly with low incomes, struggle to find or keep an affordable, safe place to live. Ripple effects of the affordable housing crisis include increasing health challenges, declining educational outcomes, and surging homelessness. Abt’s decades of rigorous evidence-building work with federal, state, local, and non-profit partners—combined with our training and technical assistance expertise—inform today’s efforts to make housing more affordable. We continue to shape rental assistance programs like Housing Choice Vouchers and public housing, policies to boost production and preservation of affordable housing, and initiatives to help make homeownership feasible. Our partners and teams with lived expertise enrich our cross-sector, data-driven approach with first-hand insights, enabling us to advance housing affordability for all.
Expertise
- Housing Choice Voucher and Rental Assistance Policy Research and Evaluation
- Technical Assistance
- Needs Assessments and Community Engagement
- Program Design and Implementation
- Capacity Building and Institutional Strengthening
- Policy, Regulatory and Agency Support
Clients Include
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
Colorado Department of Local Affairs
Rhode Island Department of Housing
Washington Department of Commerce
Washington State Housing Finance Commission
Virginia Housing
National Council of State Housing Agencies
National Urban League
Conrad N. Hilton Foundation
JP Morgan Chase Foundation
United Way of Greater Los Angeles
Our Work
Provide evidence on the extent to which families can access more opportunities via mobility-related services funded by HUD
Capacity building for local governments to ensure equitable access to housing, jobs, and transit access within new infrastructure investments
Online guide to local housing policy for cities around the U.S. to create comprehensive and balanced local housing strategies
Mixed-methods evaluation of federal incentives for landlords to lease more units to tenants under the Housing Choice Voucher Program
Findings that tenant-based housing vouchers help contribute to ending homelessness in Los Angeles
Assessment of how states could build affordable housing under the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program amid COVID-19 supply chain gaps
Our Experts
Principal Associate and Director of Housing and Community Initiatives, Social & Economic Policy
United States
Insights
Through the Roof: What Communities Can Do About the High Cost of Rental Housing in America
This report from Abt’s Jeffrey Lubell and others shows what U.S. localities can do to mitigate the rising cost of rental housing.
The Far-Reaching Harms of Housing Unaffordability on Renters
Abt helped conduct a study that examined how housing affordability affects renters and the tactics that people use to survive.
Rent-to-Save Pilot in Cambridge, MA
The Cambridge Housing Authority and Compass Working Capital collaborated to test the effects of automatically enrolling families in an asset-building program within two public housing developments. The goal was to answer two questions: How could asset…
L.A.’s Approach to Homelessness & Vouchers Shows Promise, According to Abt, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation Study
Abt’s study found that people experiencing homelessness in LA County are more successful than other households at using a tenant-based federal housing voucher.
How Can State Housing Finance Agencies Improve Energy Efficiency?
Two reports provide insight on ways state housing finance agencies can advance affordable housing through energy efficiency efforts.
Mortgage Journeys: Identifying New Homebuyer Challenges
Fannie Mae had conducted extensive research with various groups of consumers (e.g., renters, young adults, delinquent borrowers, homeowners, refinancers, etc.), including several survey research projects to examine how consumers shop for mortgages. To…
Variation in Development Costs for LIHTC Projects
This report examines the factors affecting the cost of developing affordable multifamily rental housing with the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program (LIHTC). Using data provided by 14 LIHTC syndicators for more than 2,500 projects, that include more than 160,000 housing units, we analyze the factors associated with higher and lower per-unit development costs. We find that the per-unit cost of development decreases as development size increases and the average annual construction wage decreases. We also found that the following factors were associated with higher development costs: location in the principal city of a metro area (as opposed to a suburban or rural location), new construction (as opposed to acquisition/rehab), use of multiple financing sources and location in New England, the Mid-Atlantic or Pacific regions.As noted in the report, there are important tradeoffs involved in developing affordable housing across the United States. For example:Projects cost more to build in high-cost areas, but affordable housing is needed in these locations as much as--or even more than--in lower-cost areas.Smaller projects cost more to build on a per-unit basis than larger projects, but larger projects are not desirable in all locations.Smaller units cost less to build but are not appropriate for all household types.