BROADCAST EMAIL – Regulatory Update

October 17, 2016

In today’s Federal Register, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published a Notice of Statutorily Mandated Designation of Difficult Development Areas and Qualified Census Tracts for 2017 for purposes of the low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC). LIHTC developments in DDAs or QCTs are eligible for as much as 30 percent more LIHTC subsidy.

The designations of DDAs in this notice are based on modified Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs), FY 2016 income limits, and 2010 Census population counts. In addition, HUD has implemented a minimum population requirement for metropolitan Small Difficult Development Areas in order to avoid designating areas unsuitable for residential development, such as airports. This notice also designates QCTs based on new income and poverty data released in the American Community Survey (ACS). HUD relies on the most recent three sets of ACS estimates to ensure that anomalous estimates, due to sampling, do not affect the QCT status of tracts.

The effective date of the new QCTs and DDAs is January 1, 2017 (rather than the July 1 effective date in 2016).