Best Practices in Low-Income Tax Credit Housing

I ran across this a while ago, and finally got around to posting this. This is a report on Best Practices in Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC). Building Opportunity: Civil Rights Best Practices in the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program-An Updated Fifty-State Review of LIHTC "Qualified Allocation Plans" is an interesting report on what states can do to affirmatively further fair housing using the LIHTC program.

Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority (WHEDA)'s Qualified Allocation Plan can be found here. Does it employ best practices? On the contrary, just about the only mention of Wisconsin is criticism (along with other states) on "incentivizing community support". Advocates here in Wisconsin have criticized WHEDA for this part of the QAP, which can lead to a lack of affordable housing being built in hostile communities. That is not to say that Wisconsin's QAP is poor-there are many parts I like in the QAP, but the community support scoring, alas, is not one of them.

There is no reason why a Housing Trust Fund could not adopt some of the best practice strategies in this study. Furthermore, to counteract a possible lack of community support in certain municipalities, HTF commitment could be used to increase community support scoring in a local development's application for tax credits.