Housing Trust Funds 

There are now more than 600 state and local government housing trust funds (HTFs) throughout the United States. Those funds recently generated $1.6 billion dollars annually for affordable housing – with the vast majority of those revenues coming from dedicated sources of public funds. HTFs also leverage contributions by other funding sources, such as nonprofit developers and governmental housing agencies, that total many times that amount.

For example, the 38 states that have established HTFs collected more than $1.28 billion in a single recent year, to advance affordable housing initiatives. The average amount of public and private funds leveraged for every dollar invested in affordable housing by state HTFs has been nearly seven dollars. At that rate, state trust funds alone leverage at least $8 billion for affordable housing in a single year.

The Center’s mission will be important in prodding governments to use their available HTF resources without diluting those funds’ effectiveness by unjustified costs, conditions, delays, and other exclusionary housing policies. Government investment in affordable housing now would be an important economic stimulus.