Title
Authorizing the Philadelphia City Council Committee on Housing, Neighborhood Development and the Homeless to conduct public hearings to explore the crisis of expiring affordable housing subsidies and the impact of those expirations on the availability of affordable housing units in the City of Philadelphia.
Body
WHEREAS, In 1937, Congress established a public housing program that created and authorized local public housing authorities to produce affordable housing units for households with low-incomes; and
WHEREAS, Congress passed The Housing Act of 1949 authorizing the construction of 810,000 low-income housing units; and
WHEREAS, While these investments in the creation of affordable housing were historic, the implementation of this program was fraught with racial discrimination, local opposition to affordable housing, and underfunding, among other issues; and
WHEREAS, In 1965, Congress established the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as the federal agency responsible for addressing the country's affordable housing needs; and
WHEREAS, Starting in the 1970s, with the Section 8 New Construction and Substantial Rehabilitation Program, Congress began to privatize the production of affordable housing; and
WHEREAS, At the same time, localities like Philadelphia began to see a substantial decrease in federal funding to support the maintenance of and production of affordable housing; and
WHEREAS, To make the creation of affordable housing more financially sustainable, the federal government began providing tax subsidies to private business owners to create and maintain affordable housing units; and
WHEREAS, In 1986, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) was created by the Tax Reform Act as an indirect federal subsidy that allowed investors to claim dollar-for-dollar tax reduction on federal income tax returns for a percentage of the costs incurred in developing affordable housing; and
WHEREAS, The Low Income Housing Tax Credit did p...
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