A Good Day for
 Affordable Housing!
Dear Friends,
 
As you might have heard on the news this morning, both the House and Senate have passed a $1.3 trillion budget that funds the federal government through September 30. Earlier this afternoon, President Trump signed that bill into law.
 
What you might not have heard is that the budget is very good news for housing and housing advocates!!
The short story is that the budget includes increases not only well above what President Trump proposed in his original budget, but also increases above 2017 budget levels. Not only do mobile vouchers and project based vouchers get large increases, but so do VASH, public housing, and homelessness prevention programs . Instead of losing 250,000 vouchers nationwide, the budget for the Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) program increased 10%!!
The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) has published an overview on what this bill means for housing funding for FY18. You can access this article here .

This is the key paragraph from that article (emphasis added):
 
The bill provides HUD programs with $4.6 billion in additional funding overall compared to FY17, or more than $12 billion above the president’s FY18 request . With a 10% one-year increase to HUD, many programs were funded at levels significantly above what was proposed in either the House or Senate draft bills. The spending bill renews all Housing Choice Vouchers and provides new vouchers to veterans and people with disabilities, allocates nearly $1 billion in additional funding to repair and operate public housing, and boosts funding for the HOME Investment Partnerships program (HOME) to the highest level in seven years.
You may also access the NLIHC budget chart , where the key columns to compare are “FY17 Final”, “FY18 President,” and “FY18 Final” which is the bill that just passed.
 
Today is a good day to be in housing!