Federal Housing Assistance in Los Angeles County is Primarily for High-Income Neighborhoods
Brief
Paavo Monkkonen | Yiwen (Xavier) Kuai
November 2024
Four major areas of federal housing assistance are targeted at low-income households. The much larger, fifth budget item is the assistance that benefits upperclass households, the Mortgage Interest Deduction (MID). Eliminating the MID would generate new revenue for the federal government — in 2014, it cost the U.S. Treasury more than $100 billion. An expansion of such magnitude might allow us to cover all the households in LA County eligible for housing subsidies, and shift housing investment to parts of the county that have received less federal support since the government began housing subsidy programs.
