Taking Stock of Housing Stock

The more than $730.5 million in HUD grant funds awarded to the New York City Housing Authority surpasses the total of all states but its own by more than $530 million.

Photo of public housing in the Bronx by ginga71: Getty Images

At a time when workforce housing is sorely needed, last month the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded $3.17 billion in Public Housing Repair funding to 2,756 public housing authorities (PHAs) in all 50 states, D.C. and several U.S. territories to make capital investments to their public housing stock.

Site Selection’s research and analysis team went to work sorting out the data and making calculations to see which locations are getting the most assistance overall and per capita based on the populations of the metro areas served by those PHAs.

For example, while the Chicago Housing Authority led the way overall in Illinois with $58.3 million of the more than $150 million granted to PHAs in the state, LaSalle County’s nearly $3 million in grant funding (Ottawa metro area) led the way on a per-capita basis, followed by housing authorities serving the Carbondale-Marion metro area in Jackson County and then Rockford.

Similarly, while HUD funds totaling more than $13.6 million will be welcome at the Louisville Metro Housing Authority in Kentucky (where the metro population is nearly 1.3 million), the far-and-away per-capita leader in the state is Middlesboro, a town of 23,568 people located hard by the Tennessee and Virginia state lines in Kentucky’s southeastern corner that has been granted more than $1.5 million.

That town’s grant funding placed it third in the nation in a per-capita ranking based on the populations of the metros served by the PHAs. Here are the top 10, with three communities in Arkansas seeing ample portions of the state’s overall total of nearly $31.3 million:

The total of more than $730 million going to the No. 10 metro on that list — the New York City Housing Authority — is more than any other state’s total funding and represents nearly 90% of New York’s state total of more than $818.5 million. Here are the top 10 states by total HUD grant funds awarded:

HUD states that PHAs “can utilize this funding for the development, financing, modernization, and management improvements of public housing developments.” They can use the funding to complete large-scale improvements such as replacing roofs or making energy-efficient upgrades to heating systems and installing water conservation measures.

Access the full spreadsheet of data points for the 10 largest PHA grants in each of the 50 states here.

Multiple Insights from Harvard

Two days after the grant funding announcement, HUD announced that a team from Harvard University had won the $20,000 first prize in HUD’s 2024 Innovation in Affordable Housing Student Design and Planning Competition.

For the 2024 competition, HUD partnered with Madison Community Development Authority in Madison, Wisconsin, which received just over $2.4 million in the announced HUD grant funding. The Harvard University team was one of four finalist teams challenged with creating an innovative and sustainable mixed-income community that includes affordable and workforce housing, including two teams from University of California, Berkeley and one team from the University of Maryland.

“Creativity wins the day, and I am so proud of this next generation of students for thinking outside of the box,” said HUD Acting Secretary Adrianne Todman. “This competition not only puts our future housing professionals on display as they channel their ingenuity to build affordable, resilient workforce housing for families in Wisconsin, it also serves as a model of what HUD, through this kind of partnership, can do to house millions of families across the nation.”

Sec. Todman over the past year has chaired the Interagency Community Investment Committee in order to focus the efforts of eight federal agencies on investing in under-resourced communities with programs devoted to housing and small business. The committee this week held a roundtable and provided an update on its accomplishments.

The severity of the housing challenge was evident in a report issued in May from another part of Harvard, as the university’s Joint Center for Housing Studies released “America’s Rental Housing 2024.”

Among its findings:

• “The number of cost-burdened renter households hit a record high of 22.4 million in 2022, an increase of two million households since 2019. The number of severely cost-burdened renter households also hit an all-time high of 12.1 million, a full 1.5 million above pre-pandemic levels.”


• “Cost burdens continue to climb the income scale. While all income groups had increasing cost-burden rates from 2019 to 2022, middle-income renters making $45,000 to $74,999 saw their cost-burdened share rise the fastest with a 5.4 percentage point increase to 41%. The already high share of cost-burdened renter households earning less than $30,000 annually rose 1.5 percentage points from 2019 to 2022, reaching 83%.”


• “More than half (51%) of renter households living in the 56 metros with populations over 1 million were burdened by housing costs in 2022.”


• “In 2021, 3.9 million renter households (8.4% of renter households) lived in substandard housing with multiple problems such as structural deficiencies, a lack of upkeep, or the inconsistent provision of basic features such as hot and cold running water, heat, and electricity. Households with lower incomes and households of color are disproportionately exposed to substandard conditions.”


• “Nationwide, an estimated 75% of land in major cities is zoned exclusively for single-family homes. A growing list of states are preempting local single-family zoning laws to compel more neighborhoods to allow a range of housing options.”

This report was written by Adam Bruns. Data collection and analysis was performed by Daniel Boyer with research assistance from Brian Espinoza and McKenzie Wright.