Ben Carsons public housing plan would be crippled if the GOPs tax bill passes
The GOP’s tax bill would severely curtail its own administration’s plan to solve the country’s $49 billion backlog of public housing repairs. That estimate doesn’t include repairs related to damage from the recent hurricanes — repairs that could also face serious slowdowns if the House GOP’s plan passes.
The House tax plan would tax private activity bonds — a tax-exempt funding mechanism that allows developers to borrow money for a host of projects, including affordable housing projects, at low-interest rates. Lawmakers claim eliminating the exemption would save $38.9 billion (even as the tax bill would grow the deficit by an estimated $1.7 trillion). But housing advocates warn taxing those bonds would make it unnecessarily difficult to rebuild affordable housing, including housing destroyed by the recent hurricanes, and severely cripple the only program that has effectively addressed the backlog of essential repairs for America’s 1.1 million public housing units.
Thanks to funding cuts in Congress over the years, public housing authorities are not receiving enough money to make important repairs and renovations for their decades-old public housing apartment complexes. In some places, public housing facilities have fallen into such a state of disrepair that they are are almost uninhabitable.
https://thinkprogress.org/gop-tax-bill-2dfd444b11b6/
