What’s at stake?

Federal subsidized housing programs play an essential role in reducing housing cost burdens for families with low and moderate incomes throughout the United States, enabling more than 5 million renter households and about 10 million people to keep housing costs within their means. The programs we highlight above currently meet the following housing needs:

• The Housing Choice Voucher Program supports 2.3 million households, giving them assistance to rent private-market housing units. These funds support landlords in providing safe, affordable rental housing.
• The HOME Investment Partnerships Program provides essential assistance for communities to invest in building and preserving affordable housing, often in association with Low-Income Housing Tax Credit–supported developments.
• The Community Development Block Grant program supports infrastructure investments in historically underinvested communities, with grants often used for road improvements, site clearance, and other needs for new housing investments.
• The public housing program directly houses about 800,000 households.
• Other project-based public housing programs—including some designed specifically for the elderly and the disabled—support 1.6 million households, though some of these programs are supported by the US Department of Agriculture.
• Programs to support people experiencing homelessness provide shelter and other resources to the record-high number of people who do not have a home.

We detail how funding from each of these programs is distributed at the county and state levels on our interactive Federal Infrastructure database.

Already, these programs are underfunded compared with their need. An additional 16 million households with low and moderate incomes are cost burdened and currently receive no federal housing assistance. A large share of the people affected are children, seniors, or those with a disability, yet funding levels have not meaningfully increased over the past decade to keep up with growing needs. Since January, many HUD employees have been laid off, limiting the agency’s ability to accomplish its mission.

If policymakers want to make housing more affordable and available, more federal support is needed for housing assistance and development, not less. An expansion of the Housing Choice Voucher Program to cover everyone who qualifies could reduce the national poverty rate by 13 percent and be especially beneficial for children. Cities need federal funding to acquire land and build affordable housing near transit. And thousands of public housing units throughout the country are in a state of disrepair. To better address the ongoing housing affordability crisis, the federal government could invest in these housing needs, rather than undermine them.

About the data

To estimate the figures in this tool, we compiled the actual national spending for fiscal year 2023, excluding emergency appropriations. We calculated spending data at the county level from our interactive Federal Infrastructure database. We then developed a relationship file to estimate distributions at the congressional district level from our county-level funding data. We weighted the distributions of funding to congressional districts by population. We assembled data on people and households supported by these programs from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Picture of Subsidized Households data. The people, housing, and total funding categories in the tool comprises the Housing Choice Voucher Program, the public housing program (both capital and operating funds), the Community Development Block Grant program, the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, and the Project-Based Section 8 program.

The dataset presented in this tool is an informed estimate based on past spending; it may not reflect how future funding is distributed. It does not provide details about several other major federal housing programs, such as programs addressing homelessness and other public housing programs.

Project credits

This data tool was funded by a grant from the Melville Charitable Trust. We are grateful to them and to all our funders, who make it possible for Urban to advance its mission. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders. Funders do not determine research findings or the insights and recommendations of our experts. More information on our funding principles is available here. Read our terms of service here.

RESEARCH Yonah Freemark, Amanda Hermans, and Tomi Rajninger

DATA VISUALIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT Mitchell Thorson

EDITING Wesley Jenkins and Alex Tammaro