LOS ANGELES (AP) — While Americans continue to struggle under unrelentingly high rents, as many as 223,000 affordable housing units across the U.S. could disappear in the next five years alone.
It leaves low-income tenants facing protracted eviction battles, scrambling to pay a two-fold rent increase or more, or shunted back into a housing market where costs can easily eat half a paycheck.
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An aerial view shows Hillside Villa, bottom center, an apartment complex where Marina Maalouf is a longtime tenant, in Los Angeles, Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
A poster symbolizing solidarity within the tenant community hangs on the wall of Marina Maalouf's apartment in Los Angeles, Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. Maalouf, a longtime Hillside Villa apartment complex resident, participated in protests after rents doubled in 2019. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Marina Maalouf, a longtime resident of Hillside Villa, sits on a sofa as her granddaughter eats pizza for lunch in their apartment in Los Angeles, Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Marina Maalouf, a longtime resident of Hillside Villa, sits for a photo in her apartment in Los Angeles, Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Marina Maalouf, a longtime resident of Hillside Villa who participated in protests after rents doubled in 2019, stands for a photo outside her apartment building in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Those affordable housing units were built with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, or LIHTC, a federal program launched in 1987 that provides tax credits to developers in exchange for keeping rents low.
It has pumped out 3.6 million units nationwide, and its expansion is now central to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ housing plan to build 3 million new homes.
The catch? The buildings typically only need to be kept affordable for a minimum of 30 years. For the wave of LIHTC construction in the 1990s, those deadlines are arriving now, threatening to hemorrhage affordable housing supply when Americans need it most.
Data on LIHTC units that will lose their affordability nationally remains a rough estimate.
The best nationwide analysis estimated that by 2030 roughly 350,000 LIHTC units are at risk of losing affordability. That’s 1 million units by 2040, according to the National Housing Preservation Database.
Not all units that lose LIHTC’s affordability protections become market rate. Some are kept affordable by other government subsidies, by merciful landlords or by states, including California, Colorado and New York, that have worked to keep costs low.
Still, it’s a sizeable loss to a housing market already in dire need of new units.
“If we are losing the homes that are currently affordable and available to households, then we’re losing ground on the crisis,” said Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
“It’s sort of like having a boat with a hole at the bottom,” she said.
Local governments and nonprofits can purchase expiring apartments, new tax credits or other subsidies can be applied that extend the affordability, or tenants can organize to try to force action from landlords and city officials.
California now requires all new LIHTC properties to be affordable for 55 years. Expiring developments built before that rule are also prioritized for new tax credits, and the state essentially requires that all LIHTC applicants have experience owning and managing affordable housing.
California and Colorado require landlords to notify local governments and tenants before their building expires. Cities and nonprofits then have first shot at buying the property to keep it affordable.
However, unlike California many states haven’t extended LIHTC agreements beyond 30 years, let alone taken other measures to keep expiring housing affordable.
Still, local governments or nonprofits scraping together the funds to buy apartment buildings is far from a guarantee. And while new tax credits can reup a lapsing LIHTC affordability, they are limited, doled out to states by the Internal Revenue Service based on population.
For more than two decades, the low rent on Marina Maalouf’s LIHTC apartment in Los Angeles’ Chinatown was a saving grace for her family, including a granddaughter who has autism.
When that grace expired, the landlord, no longer legally obligated to keep the building affordable, hiked rent from $1,100 to $2,660 in 2021 — out of reach for Maalouf and her family. Tenant protests, a rent strike and eviction filings followed.
The eviction case is ongoing, haunting Maalouf’s nights with fears of her family ending up in sleeping bags on a friend’s floor or worse. Mornings she repeats a mantra: “We still here. We still here.” But fighting day after day to make it true is exhausting.
Still, Maalouf’s tenant activism has helped move the needle. The City of Los Angeles has offered the landlord $15 million to keep her building affordable through 2034, but that deal wouldn’t get rid of over 30 eviction cases still proceeding, including Maalouf’s, or the $25,000 in back rent she owes.
On a recent day in the courtyard of Maalouf’s apartment, her granddaughter shuffled up with a glass of water. She is 5 years old, but with special needs, her speech is more disconnected words than sentences.
“That’s why I’ve been hoping everything becomes normal again, and she can be safe,” said Maalouf, her voice shaking with emotion. She has urged her son to start saving money for the worst.
“We’ll keep fighting,” she said, “but day by day it’s hard. ... I’m tired already.”
Bedayn is a corps member of The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
An aerial view shows Hillside Villa, bottom center, an apartment complex where Marina Maalouf is a longtime tenant, in Los Angeles, Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
A poster symbolizing solidarity within the tenant community hangs on the wall of Marina Maalouf's apartment in Los Angeles, Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. Maalouf, a longtime Hillside Villa apartment complex resident, participated in protests after rents doubled in 2019. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Marina Maalouf, a longtime resident of Hillside Villa, sits on a sofa as her granddaughter eats pizza for lunch in their apartment in Los Angeles, Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Marina Maalouf, a longtime resident of Hillside Villa, sits for a photo in her apartment in Los Angeles, Tuesday, Oct. 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Marina Maalouf, a longtime resident of Hillside Villa who participated in protests after rents doubled in 2019, stands for a photo outside her apartment building in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2024. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
MAGDEBURG, Germany (AP) — A car plowed into a busy outdoor Christmas market in the eastern German city of Magdeburg on Friday, killing at least two people and injuring at least 60 others in what authorities called a deliberate attack.
The driver was arrested at the scene shortly after the car barreled into the market at around 7 p.m., when it was teeming with holiday shoppers looking forward to the weekend.
Verified bystander footage distributed by the German news agency dpa showed the suspect’s arrest on a walkway in the middle of the road. A nearby police officer pointing a handgun at the man shouted at him as he lay prone. Other officers soon arrived to take the man into custody.
The two people confirmed dead were an adult and a toddler, but officials said additional deaths couldn't be ruled out because 15 people had been seriously injured.
The violence shocked the city, bringing its mayor to the verge of tears and marring a festive event that's part of a centuries-old German tradition. It also prompted several other German towns to cancel their weekend Christmas markets as a precaution and out of solidarity with Magdeburg's loss.
The suspect is a 50-year-old Saudi doctor who moved to Germany in 2006, Tamara Zieschang, the interior minister for the state of Saxony-Anhalt, said at a news conference. He has been practicing medicine in Bernburg, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Magdeburg, she said.
“As things stand, he is a lone perpetrator, so that as far as we know there is no further danger to the city," Saxony-Anhalt's governor, Reiner Haseloff, told reporters. "Every human life that has fallen victim to this attack is a terrible tragedy and one human life too many."
The violence occurred in Magdeburg, a city of about 240,000 people west of Berlin that serves as Saxony-Anhalt’s capital. Friday's attack came eight years after an Islamic extremist drove a truck into crowded Christmas market in Berlin, killing 13 people and injuring many others. The attacker was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.
Christmas markets are a huge part of German culture as an annual holiday tradition cherished since the Middle Ages and successfully exported to much of the Western world. In Berlin alone, more than 100 markets opened late last month and brought the smells of mulled wine, roasted almonds and bratwurst to the capital. Other markets abound across the country.
German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said late last month that there were no concrete indications of a danger to Christmas markets this year, but that it was wise to be vigilant.
Hours after Friday's tragedy, the wail of sirens clashed with the market’s festive ornaments, stars and leafy garlands.
Magdeburg resident Dorin Steffen told dpa that she was at a concert in a nearby church when she heard the sirens. The cacophony was so loud “you had to assume that something terrible had happened.”
She called the attack “a dark day” for the city.
“We are shaking,” Steffen said. “Full of sympathy for the relatives, also in the hope that nothing has happened to our relatives, friends and acquaintances.”
The attack reverberated far beyond Magdeburg, with Haseloff calling it a catastrophe for the city, state and country. He said flags would be lowered to half-staff in Saxony-Anhalt and that the federal government planned to do the same.
“It is really one of the worst things one can imagine, particularly in connection with what a Christmas market should bring," the governor said.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said the attack interrupted the anticipation of a peaceful Christmas.
Chancellor OIaf Scholz posted on X: “My thoughts are with the victims and their relatives. We stand beside them and beside the people of Magdeburg.”
NATO’s secretary-general, the European Commission’s president and U.S. Vice President-elect JD Vance also expressed their condolences on X.
“Our prayers go to the people affected by this terrible attack on a Christmas market in Germany. What a ghastly attack so close to Christmas,” Vance wrote.
Magdeburg Mayor Simone Borris, who was on the verge of tears, said officials plan to arrange a memorial at the city’s cathedral on Saturday.
After a soccer match Friday evening between Bayern Munich and Leipzig, Bayern CEO Jan-Christian Dreesen asked fans at the club’s stadium to observe a minute of silence.
Moulson reported from Berlin.
Security guards stand in front of a cordoned-off Christmas Market after a car crashed into a crowd of people, in Magdeburg, Germany, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Emergency services work in a cordoned-off area near a Christmas Market, after a car drove into a crowd in Magdeburg, Germany, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Two firefighters walk through a cordoned-off area near a Christmas Market, after a car drove into a crowd in Magdeburg, Germany, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
A firefighter walks through a cordoned-off area near a Christmas Market, after a car drove into a crowd in Magdeburg, Germany, Saturday, Dec. 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Emergency services work in a cordoned-off area near a Christmas Market, after a car drove into a crowd in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Emergency services work in a cordoned-off area near a Christmas Market, after a car drove into a crowd in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Reiner Haseloff, Minister President of Saxony-Anhalt, center, is flanked by Tamara Zieschang, Minister of the Interior and Sport of Saxony-Anhalt, left, and Simone Borris, Mayor of the City of Magdeburg, at a press conference after a car plowed into a busy outdoor Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (Hendrik Schmidt/dpa via AP)
Emergency services work in a cordoned-off area near a Christmas Market, after a car drove into a crowd in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Emergency services work in a cordoned-off area near a Christmas Market, after a car drove into a crowd in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Emergency services work in a cordoned-off area near a Christmas Market, after a car drove into a crowd in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Emergency services work in a cordoned-off area near a Christmas Market, after a car drove into a crowd in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
A police officer guards at a cordoned-off area near a Christmas Market after an incident in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
A police officer guards at a cordoned-off area near a Christmas Market after an incident in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
A police officer guards at a cordoned-off area near a Christmas Market after an incident in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
A police officer guards at a blocked road near a Christmas Market, after an incident in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
A police officer guards at a blocked road near a Christmas market after an incident in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Police officers guard at a cordoned-off area near a Christmas Market after an incident in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Police officers guard at a blocked road near a Christmas market after an incident in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Emergency services work in a cordoned-off area near a Christmas Market, after an incident in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
A police officer speaks with a man at a cordoned-off area near a Christmas Market after an incident in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday, Dec. 20, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi)
Special police forces attend an incident at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday Dec. 20, 2024. (Heiko Rebsch/dpa via AP)
Reiner Haseloff (M, CDU), Minister President of Saxony-Anhalt, makes a statement after an incident at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday Dec. 20, 2024. (Heiko Rebsch/dpa via AP)
Reiner Haseloff (M, CDU), Minister President of Saxony-Anhalt, makes a statement after an incident at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday Dec. 20, 2024. (Heiko Rebsch/dpa via AP)
A policeman is seen at the Christmas market where an incident happened in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday Dec. 20, 2024. (Heiko Rebsch/dpa via AP)
Emergency services attend an incident at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday Dec. 20, 2024. (Heiko Rebsch/dpa via AP)
In this screen grab image from video, special police forces attend an incident at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday Dec. 20, 2024. (Thomas Schulz/dpa via AP)
A view of the cordoned-off Christmas market after an incident in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday Dec. 20, 2024. (Heiko Rebsch/dpa via AP)
Emergency services attend an incident at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday Dec. 20, 2024. (Heiko Rebsch/dpa via AP)
In this screen grab image from video, emergency services attend an incident at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday Dec. 20, 2024. (Thomas Schulz/dpa via AP)
Emergency services attend an incident at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday Dec. 20, 2024. (Heiko Rebsch/dpa via AP)
Emergency services attend an incident at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday Dec. 20, 2024. (Heiko Rebsch/dpa via AP)
Emergency services attend an incident at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday Dec. 20, 2024. (Heiko Rebsch/dpa via AP)
Emergency services attend an incident at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday Dec. 20, 2024. (Dörthe Hein/dpa via AP)
Emergency services attend an incident at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday Dec. 20, 2024. (Dörthe Hein/dpa via AP)
Emergency services attend an incident at the Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, Friday Dec. 20, 2024. (Dörthe Hein/dpa via AP)
