Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is one of the largest rental housing subsidy programs in the U.S. Each state’s Housing Finance Agency evaluates competing applications, by creating Qualified Allocation Plan (QAPs), to award tax credits upon successful completion of a LIHTC project. A QAP is a federally mandated document that lays out criteria and a point-based screening system tailored to the local housing market, and low-income housing needs. Since its inception in the 1986 Tax Reform Act, the LIHTC program has received serious scholarly criticism for clustered siting—in racially segregated minority communities, high-poverty neighborhoods—and exacerbating poverty concentration. Scholarly research on neighborhood effects strongly suggests that concentrated poverty negatively impacts life chances and outcomes for individuals and families. Since it is within a state’s power to determine the locations of LIHTC developments, QAPs may be an influential tool to implement poverty deconcentration by using criteria and weights that could effectively boost LIHTC developments in high-opportunity, low-poverty neighborhoods, thereby enabling LIHTC low-income residents to access better social capital for upward mobility. This research draws upon the theoretical approaches to poverty concentration, neighborhood effects, and public policy to examine whether criteria and weights in QAPs have changed over time to encourage poverty (de)concentration. This research assesses the changes in the QAP poverty deconcentration criteria and weights by employing content analysis. Furthermore, using statistical and geospatial techniques, this research also examines the concomitant changes in the poverty rate, poverty concentration, and neighborhood quality at the census tract as well as the metropolitan level. Finally, regression modeling is used to explore the degree of change in poverty concentration due to the changes in the QAPs poverty deconcentration criteria and weights over time.

Keywords: Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP), Poverty Concentration, Low-Income Housing Policy