Lessons from the 1990s Affordable Housing Preservation
The following is a part of our series on preservation best practices. You can find additional briefs and resources here.
The 1990s were a defining decade for affordable housing preservation in the United States as policymakers took action to prevent a large-scale preservation crisis. Hundreds of thousands of subsidized rental homes created in the 1960s and 1970s were approaching the point when owners could prepay mortgages, terminate affordability restrictions, opt out of affordability commitments and convert to market rate housing. The risks were so great and large scale, this was the first affordable housing crisis to achieve significant national attention. Policymakers, advocates, owners, and tenants had to invent a preservation system in real time in response to the expiring affordability restrictions.