Nearly a quarter of all U.S. working households, and over 80 percent of the nation’s lowest-income working renters’ households, faced a severe housing cost burden in 2010, spending at least 50 percent of their income on housing costs. Figures like these have jumped dramatically in recent years. Since 2007, the number of renter households experiencing severe housing cost burdens surged by 43.5 percent, or 2.5 million households; the same measure rose just 3.2 percent between 2001 and 2003.

These statistics demonstrate the rapidly growing need for affordable housing in the United States following the Great Recession, yet providers and seekers of affordable homes face multiple challenges in their efforts to develop, finance, or secure quality housing at a reasonable price. The scarcity of funding and policy challenges in both project-and individual-based affordable housing programs require limited resources to be stretched ever thinner to serve as many low- and moderate-income (LMI) community members as possible without compromising quality.