For six centuries, a people called the Hohokam inhabited central Arizona. Among their many accomplishments, they created a hydraulic empire of sorts, a spiderlike web of canals intended to deliver water from the Gila and Salt rivers—tributaries of the mighty Colorado—to their agricultural fields. Eventually, the Hohokam abandoned their fields and canals. To this day, the reason is uncertain, but historian Donald Worster once surmised that the productive but ill-fated tribe “suffered the political and environmental consequences of bigness” (Worster 1985).

Bigness. It’s the perfect word to describe not only the Colorado River Basin, but so much of the geography, history, culture, politics, and challenges associated with it.

In its sheer complexity, the Colorado stands out among the rivers of America, and probably the world. In this river basin of 244,000 square miles, one-twelfth the land mass of the continental United States, exist great diversities, places of oven-hot heat and icy vastness. All but 2,000 of those square miles lie in the United States. Just 10 percent of that land mass, mostly in an elevation band of 9,000 to 11,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains, produces 90 percent of the water in the system.

Hydraulic infrastructure abounds at almost every turn on the river’s 1,450-mile journey. The first diversions occur at its very headwaters in Rocky Mountain National Park, before the river can rightfully be called a creek. Fourteen dams have been erected on the Colorado River, and hundreds more on its tributaries. Hoover Dam, perhaps the best known, hulks a half-hour drive from Las Vegas. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) built it in the 1930s to hold back the river’s spring floods, creating a reservoir now known as Lake Mead. A second massive reservoir, Lake Powell, lies upstream 300 miles. It’s the result of Glen Canyon Dam, built in the 1960s with the goal of providing a means for the four Upper Basin states—Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—to store the water they had agreed to deliver to the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada, and to Mexico.

At their fullest, the two reservoirs—which are the biggest in the country—can hold four years of flows of the Colorado River. A recent paper suggested that the two reservoirs could be considered one giant reservoir, bisected by a “glorious ditch” (CRRG 2018). That ditch is the Grand Canyon, which celebrates the one hundredth anniversary of its designation as a national park this year.

The dams, reservoirs, tunnels, and aqueducts of the Colorado deliver water to 40 million people in seven U.S. states—more than 1 in 10 Americans—and two Mexican states. The river’s water also nourishes more than 5.5 million acres of agricultural fields within and outside the river basin. Residents of Denver, Los Angeles, and other cities outside the basin rely on the river; crops in fields reaching almost to Nebraska benefit from transbasin exports and diversions.

The river provides a cultural and economic resource for 28 tribes within the basin. A $1.4 trillion economy hums along in and around the basin. This includes the snowmaking cannons at Vail and Aspen, the nightly water spectacle at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, and the aeronautics industry of Southern California. Up and down the river, more than 225 federal recreation sites draw visitors eager to try their luck at fishing, rafting, hiking, or just taking in the sights. This river and the lands around it loom large in the public imagination.

It’s a big, complicated, and now vulnerable hydraulic web. Entering the twenty-first century, the river was already a sponge fully squeezed, its water rarely making it to the Gulf of California.

Rapid population growth, rising temperatures, and declining river flows are putting pressure on the system, forcing river managers and users to devise creative, forward-looking plans that consider both water and land. The Lincoln Institute’s Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy strongly encourages this approach. “We are trying to think more holistically by considering the management and planning of land and water resources together,” says Babbitt Center Program Manager Faith Sternlieb. “These are the foundations upon which water policy in the Colorado River Basin has been considered and crafted, and these are the roots we must nurture for a sustainable water future.” 

Taming the Colorado

The need to nurture roots has driven the development of the Colorado River Basin since the first people began farming there. The Hohokam, Mojave, and other tribes built canal systems of varying complexity to irrigate their fields. In the late 1800s, federal interest in tapping the river to boost agricultural production surged. By 1902, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) had created what is now the Bureau of Reclamation. During the twentieth century, the Bureau became the prime builder, and funder, of agricultural water projects throughout the basin.

Work on the Laguna Diversion Dam, the first dam on the Colorado River, began in 1904, yielding water a few years later for fields near Yuma, Arizona. Yuma sits in the Mojave Desert, where Arizona, California, and Mexico come together. There, long, nearly frost-free growing seasons coupled with fertile soils and Colorado River water enable extraordinary productivity. Today, farmers in the Yuma area of Arizona and Imperial Valley of California proclaim that during winter they grow 80 to 90 percent of the greens and other vegetables in the United States and Canada. This area, declares Arizona’s Yuma County Agriculture Water Coalition, is to U.S. agriculture what Silicon Valley is to electronics and what Detroit was to automobiles (YCAWC 2015).

All told, irrigation accounted for 85 percent of total water withdrawals in the basin between 1985–2010 (Maupin 2018). Today, agriculture still accounts for 75 to 80 percent of total water withdrawals. This supports row crops such as corn and the perennial crop of alfalfa, which is grown from Wyoming to Mexico. Much of the crops go to livestock: The Pacific Institute, in a 2013 report, estimated that 60 percent of agricultural production in the basin feeds beef cattle, dairy cattle, and horses (Cohen 2013). Agriculture has always been, and will remain, a key piece of the Colorado River puzzle.

But almost as quickly as the Bureau of Reclamation began diverting water for agriculture, other needs arose, from producing electricity to slaking the thirst of booming Los Angeles. By the early 1920s, the seven states of the arid West realized they had to find a way to share a river that would become—as the river’s preeminent historian, the late Norris Hundley, would later write—“the most disputed body of water in the country and probably in the world” (Hundley 1996). Years later, Hundley famously referred to the area as a “basin of contention” (Hundley 2009).

Today, dozens of laws, treaties, and other agreements and rulings collectively called the Law of the River govern the use of Colorado River Basin water. They include federal environmental laws, a treaty over salinity, amendments to treaties, a U.S. Supreme Court case, and interstate compacts. None is more fundamental than the Colorado River Compact of 1922, which still guides the annual share of water each state gets. Representatives of the seven basin states hammered out its provisions in grueling meetings held near Santa Fe. They were driven by both ambition and fear.

Ambitious California needed federal muscle to tame the Colorado River if it was to realize its agricultural potential. Los Angeles had aspirations, too. In the century’s first two decades, it had grown more than 500 percent and wanted the electricity that a large dam on the river could deliver. A few years later, it also decided it wanted the water itself. To pay for this giant dam, California needed federal help. Congress would approve that aid only if California had secured support from the other southwestern states.

Fear drove the other basin states. If the first-in-time, first-in-right legal system of prior appropriation used by Western states was to be applied to the Colorado River, California and perhaps Arizona would reap the benefits. The headwaters states, including Colorado, were developing too slowly to benefit from their own long and snowy winters. Delph Carpenter, a Colorado farm boy turned water lawyer, forged the consensus. Both basins, upper and lower, got 7.5 million acre-feet, for a total of 15 million acre-feet. Mexico needed water, too, which the compact assumed would come from surplus waters. A later treaty between the two nations specified 1.5 million acre-feet for Mexico.

The 1922 Colorado River Compact also nodded, but no more, at what later writers called a sword of Damocles hanging over these allocations: water for the basin’s Indian reservations. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 1908 case called Winters v. United States, had declared that when Congress reserved land for a reservation, it implicitly reserved water sufficient to fulfill the purpose of that reservation, including agriculture. That ruling did not determine the amounts that were needed. Tribal water rights within the basin now constitute 2.4 million acre-feet, in many cases senior in priority to all other users within the allocations of the individual states. That’s a fifth of the river’s total flows. Importantly, specific water allocations for some of the largest tribes still have not been resolved.

The framers of the 1922 compact made a big, fatally flawed assumption: That enough water existed to meet everyone’s needs. Average annual flows from 1906 to 1921 had averaged 18 million acre-feet. But even by 1925, just three years after the Compact came into being and three years short of its Congressional approval, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist named Eugene Clyde La Rue had delivered a report indicating the river probably would deliver too little water to meet these hopes and expectations. Other studies about the same time delivered the same conclusions.

They were right. Over a longer period, from 1906 to 2018, the river has averaged 14.8 million acre-feet per year. Averages have dropped during the twenty-first century, in the midst of a 19-year drought, to 12.3 million acre-feet. In the last water year, ending in September 2018, the river carried only 4.6 million acre-feet. That’s just 200,000 more acre-feet than California’s annual entitlement.

The Shift from Farms to Cities

Agriculture was the main driver of development along the Colorado River. According to a recent report from the U.S. Geological Survey, 85 percent of water withdrawals went toward irrigation between 1985 and 2010 (Maupin 2018). The fields around Yuma, Arizona, and the Imperial and Palo Verde valleys of California consume more than 4 million acre-feet of Colorado River water annually, nearly a third of the river’s annual flows. But with population growth, water use has shifted to urban needs.

In Colorado, for example, 95 percent of water imported from the Colorado River headwaters through the Colorado-Big Thompson (CBT) project was once used for agriculture; now, that number is closer to 50 percent. As another example of the complexity of systems in the Colorado River Basin, CBT water is divided into units which can be bought and sold. The amount of water in a unit varies year to year depending on the total amount of water available; when CBT is at full capacity, a unit is one acre-foot. Agricultural users owned 85 percent of the units when trading began in the late 1950s, but currently own less than one-third of available units. Municipalities own the balance, but often lease the water to farms until it’s needed. The current price for a CBT unit is close to $30,000.

Such water-sharing agreements are becoming more common in a system stretched too thin. Rotational fallowing, also known as lease-fallowing or alternative-transfer mechanisms, has played a role in shifting water from farms to cities. Farmers in the Palo Verde Valley struck a deal with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 19 million customers, to fallow between 7 and 35 percent of their land on a rotating basis. Metropolitan’s customers, in turn, get the water, which can be stored in Lake Mead. Similar deals, still underlined with tension but increasingly accepted, exist between Southern California municipalities and farmers in the Imperial Valley and between cities and farmers along Colorado’s Front Range urban corridor.

For their part, cities tend to tout conservation and development efforts they’ve made with water in mind. Many are encouraging density, reducing the water needed for landscaping; some have implemented turf-removal programs; and toilets, showers and other fixtures have become more efficient. Metropolitan Water District of Southern California chalked up a 36 percent per capita reduction in water use from 1985 to 2015, a time of several droughts, according to Planning magazine (Best 2018).

In Nevada, the population served by the Southern Nevada Water Authority has increased 41 percent since 2002, but the per capita consumption of Colorado River water fell 36 percent. The agency’s Colby Pellegrino, speaking at a September 2018 conference called “Risky Business on the Colorado River,” said conservation is the first, second, and third strategy for achieving reduced water consumption. “If you live in the Las Vegas Valley, where there is less than 4 inches of rainfall a year, and you have a median covered in turf, and the only person walking on that turf is the person pushing a lawn mower—that is a luxury our community cannot afford, if we want to continue to have the economy we have today,” she said.

Economy, culture, and values have been at the core of the basinwide debate about how to respond to the drought. No one sector or region can absorb the full burden of necessary reductions, and it’s clear that everyone must begin to think differently. Speaking at the “Risky Business” conference, Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, put it this way: Instead of the intentional use of water, Colorado is now talking about the intentional non-use of water. As is everyone who lives and works in the Colorado River Basin.

A River Shared

In late 1928, Congress approved the Boulder Canyon Project Act. This legislation accomplished three significant things: It authorized construction of a dam in Boulder Canyon, near Las Vegas, which was later named Hoover Dam. The law also authorized construction of the All American Canal, crucial for developing the productive farmland of California’s Imperial Valley, an area that’s now the single largest user of Colorado River water. And the Boulder Canyon Project Act divided waters among the Lower Basin states: 4.4 million acre-feet each year to California, 2.8 million acre-feet to Arizona, and 300,000 acre-feet for Nevada. Las Vegas then had a population of fewer than 3,000 people.

As the twentieth century rolled on, headwaters states also got dams, tunnels, and other hydraulic infrastructure. In 1937, Congress agreed to bankroll the Colorado-Big Thompson Project, what historian David Lavender called a “massive violation of geography” intended to divert Colorado River waters to farms in northeastern Colorado, outside of the hydrological basin. In 1956, Congress approved the Colorado River Storage Project Act, authorizing a handful of dams, including Glen Canyon.

Only Arizona remained left out. It had vigorously opposed the 1922 compact, then remained defiant. Its Congressional representatives opposed Hoover Dam and, in 1934, then-Governor Benjamin Moeur even dispatched the state’s National Guard in a showy opposition to construction of another dam being built downstream to deliver water to Los Angeles. “Put simply, Arizonans feared there would be little water remaining for them after the Upper Basin, California, and Mexico got what they wanted,” Hundley explains (Hundley 1996). Finally, in 1944—the same year the U.S. and Mexico reached an agreement about the amount of water due to the latter—Arizona legislators succumbed to political realities. Cooperation, not confrontation, would be needed for the state to get federal help to develop its share of the river. At last, the compact had the signatures of all seven states.

Arizona finally got its big slice of Colorado River pie in the 1960s. A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1963—one in a series of Arizona vs. California cases over many decades—confirmed Arizona had the right to 2.8 million acre-feet, as Congress had specified in 1928, along with all the water in its own tributaries. This is what Arizona had wanted all along. In 1968, Congress approved funding for the massive Central Arizona Project, ultimately resulting in the construction of 307 miles of concrete canal to deliver water from Lake Havasu to Phoenix and Tucson and farmers between. California supported the authorization, with a hitch: In times of shortage, it would still have rights to its 4.4 million acre-feet first. This led Arizona to later create a water banking authority to store Colorado River in underground aquifers, providing at least partial security against future shortages.

Upper Basin states had reached accord about how to apportion their 7.5 million acre-feet without notable friction: Colorado 51.75 percent, Utah 23 percent, Wyoming 14 percent, and New Mexico 11.25 percent. They used percentages, as Hundley explained, because of “uncertainty over how much water would remain after the upper basin had fulfilled its obligation to the lower-basin states” and Mexico. Fluctuations in the river’s flow, they reasoned, might mean that some years they had an amount smaller than 7.5 million acre-feet to divide between themselves. It was, in retrospect, an eminently wise decision.

Conservation Concerns

The same year the basin states framed the original Colorado River Compact, the great naturalist Aldo Leopold canoed through the Colorado River Delta in Mexico. In an essay later published in A Sand County Almanac, he described the delta as “a milk and honey wilderness.” The river itself was “nowhere and everywhere,” he wrote, and was camouflaged by a “hundred green lagoons” in its leisurely journey to the ocean. Six decades later, visiting the delta after a half-century of feverish engineering, construction, and management had emerged to put the river’s waters to good use, the journalist Philip Fradkin had a different take. He called his book A River No More.

As the 20th century closed, the environmental impacts of essentially regarding a river as plumbing drew new attention, especially in the now dewatered delta. The lagoons that had so enchanted Leopold were gone, because the stopped-up river no longer reached its southern outlet. Drainage from vast agricultural enterprises had made the river so saline that, among other things, Mexico protested that the water it was receiving was unfit to use. The many dams and diversions that came after Leopold’s visit had also put 102 river-dependent rare birds, fish, and mammals on the brink of extinction, reported the Arizona Daily Star. The newspaper lauded the work of stakeholders in a new transborder conservation effort: “The fundamental principle of ecology calls for land managers to look to the good of the whole system, not just its parts.”

Environmental groups might have used the Endangered Species Act to force the argument about solutions, but the delta was not within the United States. So they looked to find collaborative solutions. In the closing days of the tenure of Bruce Babbitt, secretary of the Interior in the Clinton administration and namesake of the Babbitt Center, the two countries adopted Minute 306. It created the framework for a dialogue that produced, under Babbitt’s successors in the Bush administration, an agreement called Minute 319 and a one-time pulse flow of more than 100,000 acre-feet in the river in 2014.

Children gleefully splashed in the rare waters of the river in Mexico during that pulse flow, but adults on both sides of the border were equally happy. Among those grinning was Jennifer Pitt, then of the Environmental Defense Fund. Litigation had been a possible route, she said, but an inclusive and transparent process with stakeholders was more productive.

“The institutional legal and physical framework we have on the Colorado River is the basis for great competition and the potential for litigation between parties,” says Pitt, who is now with Audubon. “But it is exactly that same framework that has given those parties the opportunity to collaborate as an alternative to having solutions handed to them by a court.”

Collaboration Is Critical

Reservoirs were full as the next century arrived, thanks to robust snowfall in the Rockies during the 1990s. Still, there was tension. California for decades had exceeded its apportionment of 4.4 million acre-feet, consuming a high of 5.4 million acre-feet in 1974. Upper Basin states never have fully developed their 7.5 million acre-feet, averaging 3.7 to 4 million since the 1980s, plus 500,000 acre-feet from reservoir evaporation.

Then came drought, deep and extended. The river carried just 69 percent in 2000. The winter of 2001 to 2002 was even more stingy, the river delivering just 5.9 million acre-feet, or 39 percent of average, at Lake Powell. From 2000 to 2004 was the lowest 5-year cumulative flow in the observed record. Since then, more years have been dry than wet. The reservoir levels are at near-record lows.

The 1922 compact had not contemplated this kind of long-term drought. A structural deficit came into sharp relief. Tom McCann, assistant general manager of the Central Arizona Project, coined the phrase. Very simply, the Lower Basin states were using more water than was delivered from Lake Powell each year. This was so even when the Bureau of Reclamation authorized the release of extra “equalization” flows from Powell.

“Equalization releases are like hitting the jackpot on the slot machine,” McCann says. “Back then, we were hitting the jackpot every three or four or five years, and we thought we had nothing to worry about.” Even with the jackpots, Lake Mead continued to decline, the reservoir’s widening bathtub ring charting the losses.

Climate change overlays the structural deficit. Scientists argue that warming temperatures swing a big bat in the Colorado River Basin. They term the early-twenty-first-century declines a “hot drought” as distinguished from a “dry drought.”

The prospect of this new, human-induced “hot” drought on top of a conventional drought worries many. Tree-ring studies show that the region has suffered longer, deeper droughts in the past, before measurements began. “A number of folks claim that the current 19-year period of 2000 to 2018 is the driest 19-year period on the Colorado River,” says Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District. “Nonsense. It’s not even close. If these past droughts were to happen with today’s temperatures, things could be much worse.”

The first two decades of the new millennium have seen a series of efforts to confront this new reality. In 2007, the Department of the Interior issued interim shortage guidelines, the first formal response to the drought. The Bureau of Reclamation released a Basin Supply and Demand Study in 2012, an exhaustive effort to provide a platform for future decisions. The many reports stacked tall enough to fill a box that could ship a football. They discussed population growth, rising temperatures, and the impact of increasing rain on snowpack. Demand, the study concluded, would exceed supply by 3.2 million acre-feet by 2060 (USBR 2012).

“You can argue about the numbers, you can argue about the forecast, but it was something that got everybody’s attention,” says Colorado’s Anne Castle, who was then assistant secretary of Interior for water and science. “It served as a catalyst to focus the discussion about Colorado River management more directly in dealing with future scarcity.”

Castle sees the basin now struggling to find collaborative solutions. “In a complex water system, there are so many moving parts, it’s not about one answer,” she says. “You have to manage a complex system, and you can only do that through negotiated agreements.”

Those negotiations are happening now, in the form of drought contingency planning. Even as scarcity has become more prominent, collaboration has also grown. But the measuring stick for success may well be the white mineralized walls of Lake Mead, a big reservoir in a big basin facing big challenges. Now the seven states, the tribes, and the governments of the U.S. and Mexico, with input from environmental and other nongovernmental organizations, must figure out how to keep those water levels from sagging even more. They must concoct a plan that ensures a sustainable future, while heeding the twists and turns of the past.

Allen Best writes about water, energy, and other topics from a base in metropolitan Denver, where 78 percent of his water comes from the Colorado River Basin.

Photograph: Lake Powell at Glen Canyon Dam. Credit: Pete McBride.

References

Arizona Daily Star. 1998. “Don’t Ignore Colorado Delta.” May 6, 1998.

Best, Allen. 2018. “Water Pressure: Smart Management Is Key to Making Sure Inland Cities Aren’t Left High and Dry in the Face of a Warming Climate.” Planning August/September: 40–45. https://www.planning.org/login/?next=/planning/2018/aug/waterpressure/.

Cohen, Michael, Juliet Christian-Smith, and John Berggren. 2013. Water to Supply the Land: Irrigated Agriculture in the Colorado River Basin. Oakland, CA: Pacific Institute. (May). http://pacinst.org/publication/water-to-supply-the-land-irrigated-agriculture-in-the-colorado-river-basin/.

CRRG (Colorado River Research Group). 2018. “It’s Hard to Fill a Bathtub When the Drain is Wide Open: The Case of Lake Powell.” Boulder, CO: Colorado River Research Group. (August). https://www.coloradoriverresearchgroup.org/uploads/4/2/3/6/42362959/crrg_the_case_of_lake_powell.pdf.

Fradkin, Philip. 1996. A River No More: The Colorado River and the West. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Hundley, Norris Jr. 1996. “The West Against Itself: The Colorado River—An Institutional History.” In New Courses for the Colorado River: Major Issues for the Next Century, ed. Gary D. Weatherford and F. Lee Brown. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. http://web.sahra.arizona.edu/education2/hwr213/docs/Unit1Wk4/Hundley_CRWUA.pdf.

———. 2009. Water in the West: The Colorado River Compact and the Politics of Water in the American West. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Maupin, Molly A., Tamara Ivahnenko, and Breton Bruce. 2018. “Estimates of Water Use and Trends in the Colorado River Basin, Southwestern United States, 1985–2010.” Reston, Virginia: U.S. Geological Survey. https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/sir20185049.

USBR (U.S Bureau of Reclamation). 2012. “Colorado River Basin Supply and Demand Study.” Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Interior. https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/programs/crbstudy/finalreport/Study%20Report/CRBS_Study_Report_FINAL.pdf.

Worster, Donald. 1985. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.

YCAWC (Yuma County Agriculture Water Coalition). 2015. “A Case Study in Efficiency: Agriculture and Water Use in the Yuma, Arizona Area.” Yuma, AZ: Yuma County Agriculture Water Coalition. (February). https://www.agwateryuma.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/ACaseStudyInEfficiency.pdf.

Huge cranes loom over downtown Los Angeles, and the streets are filled with the sounds of construction as gleaming new mixed-use buildings, luxury apartments, and office towers take shape. It would seem to be a sure sign of a city on the rise—except that those streets are also filled with people sleeping on the sidewalks, some in brightly colored tents, some sprawled on the pavement.

What has happened to cause so many homeless people—more than 34,000—to become part of the streetscape in this happening city? Why is it that, in a period of strong economic growth, LA and so many other U.S. cities are trying to cope with a homelessness crisis some have called the worst since the Great Depression? This is true especially for “thriving” hot-market cities, where a combination of skyrocketing housing costs, slow income growth, and a lack of housing options has increasingly led people seeking shelter to make use of common spaces like parks and public squares.

As cities create plans to deal with the urgent day-to-day needs of trying to shelter people and provide emergency health care and law-enforcement services, planners are also collaborating with their colleagues in housing and social services on logical longer-term approaches. Last fall, at the Big City Planning Directors Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts—hosted by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the American Planning Association—many planning directors said rising homelessness has complicated agendas and budgets, particularly in cities where economic inequality has deepened in recent years. They were eager to learn what other cities were doing to address this issue.

The answer to that question is as complicated as the crisis itself. While some cities are investing heavily to expand the number of traditional shelter beds they provide, others are trying new approaches, from converting motels in Los Angeles to building tiny home communities in Seattle to encouraging unusual public-private partnerships in New York City. No city has found the perfect solution, but some are making significant—and instructive—progress.

How Did We Get Here?

During a one-night count carried out across the nation in January 2017, 553,742 people in the U.S. were experiencing homelessness, according to the United States. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Of those, about a third were families including children. More than 40,000 of the people counted were unaccompanied children and young adults, and another 40,000 were veterans. Thirty-five percent of the total number of people counted were “unsheltered,” meaning they were living outside with no access to emergency shelters, transitional housing, or safe havens (USDHUD 2017).

Overall, homelessness is declining—it has gone down 13 percent since 2010—but last January’s point-in-time count revealed something significant: For the first time in seven years, the number of people counted rose compared to the prior year, by 0.7 percent. And according to HUD, nearly all of that increase occurred in cities.

Everyone experiencing homelessness has their own story of how they ended up on the street, whether due to poverty, job loss, eviction, gentrification, domestic violence, drug addiction, medical bills, or any number of other reasons. Race—and inequities in the way services are provided—is also a factor, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness; African-Americans, for example, make up 13 percent of the general population but more than 40 percent of the homeless population.

A generation or two ago, fewer people ended up homeless—in part because cities offered more diversity in low-cost housing. Common options then included rooming houses, “granny flats” or in-law units, homes where families could legally “double up,” and single-room-occupancy (SRO) apartments. These options generally disappeared with urban renewal, neighborhood redevelopment that brought higher-priced housing, and zoning that favored occupancy limits.

“One of the things that led to a dramatic increase in homelessness in the 1980s was cities getting rid of things like SRO housing,” says Alan Mallach of the Center for Community Progress. Mallach, a former city planner who has written policy reports for the Lincoln Institute on vacant properties (Mallach 2018) and legacy cities (Mallach 2013), says some places are beginning to consider reinstating that type of housing. In Los Angeles, for example, a nonprofit called SRO Housing Corporation has created dwellings for more than 2,000 formerly homeless people and has 400 homes under development.

Mallach cautions that even “affordable housing” is often unaffordable in booming cities, because the rent is typically based on a percentage of area median income (AMI). As incomes increase, so do the rents that are pegged to them. The main reason people become homeless today, according to the National Alliance to End Homelessness, is because they cannot find housing they can afford (figure 1).

In 2017, 8 of the 10 states with the highest median housing costs also had the highest rates of homelessness, according to San Francisco–based data analysis company The DataFace (figure 2). Since the Great Recession, trends contributing to a lack of affordable housing have included rising costs for land, construction, and maintenance; tighter financing for home builders; and a surge of interest in urban living, resulting in construction of mostly higher-end housing in city cores.

At the same time, new construction has not kept pace with job growth. Analyzing federal data on building permits and employment, a July 2017 report by Apartment List found that only 10 of the nation’s 50 largest metro areas had produced enough new housing to support an influx of workers (Salviati 2017). San Francisco, for example, built just one new home for every 6.8 new jobs from 2010 to 2015. Especially in tech hubs, new job creation has stoked a demand for housing, and rent prices have lit up with the lack of supply. San Jose, which had the largest undersupply of new construction among the 50 largest metro areas, also had the most rent growth: 57 percent, according to the report.

Federal Constraints, Local Innovations

This confluence of factors has created a startling reality: According to a recent report from the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, eight million Americans pay more than half their income on rent, a larger percentage of the growing rental population is extremely low-income renters, and the nation has a shortage of 7.2 million affordable rental units (NLIHC 2018).

HUD funding for homeless services reached record levels last year. HUD’s housing programs serve over one million people each year, and HUD provides housing subsidies to about 4.7 million very low-income households, which represents about 80 percent of its total budget. But changes are afoot: The President’s proposed FY19 budget included $8.8 billion in HUD cuts, though the Senate and House appropriations committees both rejected the cuts and voted for increased funding over 2018. Final votes could be delayed until after the November elections, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington, DC–based nonpartisan research and policy institute focused on reducing poverty and inequality. Meanwhile, the 2017 federal tax bill significantly reduced the value of the low-income housing tax credit, a source of long-term funding for affordable housing. According to analysis published in the New York Times, that could mean nearly 235,000 fewer apartments built over the next decade (Dougherty 2018).

With so much uncertainty at the federal level, cities are finding—and financing—their own ways forward. Increasingly, that means moving beyond stopgap measures to provide more permanent affordable housing, said Steve Berg, vice president for programs and policy at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. These longer-term policies, he said, should ensure investment of public dollars to “fix the larger affordable housing problem.”

“Housing first” is a strategy that essentially bypasses shelters and seeks to place people directly into affordable housing with support services. Research has found housing first to effectively alleviate homelessness for families experiencing temporary lack of shelter, for chronically homeless individuals, and for those with substance abuse and mental health issues. Although this approach can cost more, advocates say that by creating permanent housing, cities ultimately spend less on shelters and emergency services.

Los Angeles Bets on Motels and Municipal Bonds

A surge in homelessness in Los Angeles and other West Coast cities with severe affordable housing shortages was almost entirely responsible for last year’s national uptick in the number of homeless individuals, said HUD officials. In 2017, LA gained 42,470 new residents and hit the four million population mark; its homeless population spiked 20 percent to 34,189, with a total of 55,188 in Los Angeles County, according to HUD (USDHUD 2017). A one-night count in January 2018 conducted by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority showed the city’s homeless count had declined 6 percent, to 31,285, with 22,887 of those people unsheltered. While HUD requires cities to count their total homeless population every other year, LA—second only to New York in the size of its homeless population—elects to conduct an annual tally.

In April 2018, the LA City Council declared an emergency shelter crisis, clearing the way for Mayor Eric Garcetti’s plan to fund $20 million for new emergency shelters. His 2018–2019 budget, approved by the city council in May, will invest more than $442 million in permanent housing, temporary shelters, services, and facilities. Garcetti’s A Bridge Home plan is setting up temporary shelters on city parking lots or vacant city-leased lots across LA. Tents, trailers, and other structures will temporarily shelter as many as 100 individuals at each site—potentially 6,000 people per year who are awaiting permanent housing.

Beyond emergency shelters, the city is using funds from Measure HHH, a ballot initiative that three-quarters of LA voters passed in November 2016, committing the city to raising $1.2 billion in bonds for construction of 10,000 units of permanently affordable housing in the next decade. The city will spend more than $238 million of HHH funding this year to build 1,500 new homes at 24 project sites. In April, the city council approved two additional programs to support the effort to increase the city’s affordable housing base: one that streamlines the development process for projects that include supportive affordable housing, and another that allows LA’s 10,000 motel rooms, many of them old and in poor shape, to be converted into affordable housing with supportive services. Finally, in one of the more creative approaches to both homelessness and land use, the city has launched a pilot program that offers financial support to homeowners in some single-family neighborhoods who agree to build or upgrade small dwellings in their backyards for the purpose of housing people who don’t have homes.

Seattle Finds a Big Solution in Tiny Homes

Seattle’s homeless crisis made national headlines earlier this year when the city got into a scuffle with Amazon over a corporate head tax that would have funded social services and outreach. But the extent of homelessness in the Emerald City isn’t news to anyone who has been paying attention, especially city leaders. A January 2017 count documented 8,522 homeless people, 45 percent of whom were living unsheltered on the streets.

“The affordable housing crisis is feeding the homeless issue such that we can’t keep up,” said George Scarola, Seattle’s strategic advisor for homelessness response, at a standing-room-only session at the Urban Land Institute annual meeting in Los Angeles last year. In 2015, former Seattle Mayor Ed Murray declared a state of emergency on homelessness and called for building 1,000 tiny homes to replace tent cities. Since then, eight tiny-home villages have been built throughout the city as temporary shelters until permanent affordable housing becomes available. This approach is also being used in cities including Detroit, Dallas, and Syracuse.

Each tiny house in Seattle is built by volunteers and costs between $2,200 and $2,500. The houses are paid for by donations and by the Low Income Housing Institute (LIHI), a local nonprofit that oversees the villages and owns and operates about 2,000 units of affordable housing in the region. The city or LIHI owns the land for seven of the villages, which each have about 35 tiny homes. A local church owns the land for the remaining village, which has 14 tiny homes that LIHI also manages. LIHI said some 1,000 people are served over the course of a year by the 250 tiny homes it manages. The organization has two more villages in the pipeline.

The 8-by-12-foot homes are insulated and have heat, electricity, and locks. Because they measure under 120 square feet, they are not considered dwelling units under the International Building Code and are not required to go through the city’s permitting process. Many residents are single men and women or couples, though some villages provide two homes for families with children. Residents share common on-site bathroom, kitchen, and laundry facilities. They pay for utilities and pitch in with chores. LIHI employs case managers paid for by the city, while daily operations are self-managed by the residents.

“For folks who have been homeless for 10 years, it’s an easier transition” than an apartment, said Scarola at the ULI meeting. “People take pride in keeping these homes neat and in being part of the community.” Though the tiny home villages serve as temporary housing for only a fraction of the city’s homeless population, they’re serving an important role, he said. “More permanent supportive housing is better than ‘two hots and a cot,’” meaning a shelter’s two hot meals and a bed, Scarola said. “Overnight shelters are expensive, particularly if you’re serving the same people over 10 years.”

What cities need, Scarola said, is affordable housing that is “smaller, built faster, with many more units.” In 2017, the city invested over $68 million in rental assistance programs, bridge shelter, and low-income housing and in 2018 planned to increase that amount to $78 million. During her election campaign last fall, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan promised 1,000 additional tiny houses at an estimated cost of $10 million. Last December, after being elected, she announced city investments on a much larger scale: $100 million for affordable housing construction and preservation and home buyer assistance. These funds will help build 896 apartments in 9 new buildings, preserve 535 apartments in 4 buildings, and construct 26 new homes for low- to moderate-income families. Three of the new affordable-housing projects will provide 195 units of permanent supportive housing for formerly homeless people and people with chronic mental illness.

As for that corporate head tax: the Seattle City Council voted 7–2 to repeal it less than a month after approving it unanimously. The tax had promised to produce $47.5 million annually for the next five years to help address the homeless crisis.

Lessons from the City That Never Sleeps

New York is the nation’s most populous and densest city, with 8.6 million residents in 5 boroughs encompassing about 300 square miles. It also has the nation’s largest homeless population—approximately 76,500, an all-time high, according to the January 2017 HUD count. Most homeless New Yorkers aren’t as “visible” on the street as they are in other cities because of the city’s “right to shelter” law, a policy that grew out of court rulings in the 1970s. New York, Washington, DC, and Boston are among the few cities in the United States that are required to provide temporary housing for homeless people. As a result, New York City sheltered 95 percent of people needing homes in 2017, while Los Angeles sheltered only 25 percent, according to HUD (USDHUD 2017).

In January 2017 and January 2018, the city counted approximately 60,000 residents in municipal shelters and 3,000-plus residents who were unsheltered. (The HUD figure is higher because it includes people served in shelters operated by religious and nonprofit agencies, as well as other government agencies.) Families comprise 70 percent of the municipal shelter population.

The city tries to place people close to their support networks, in the communities they call home, to improve the odds of quickly stabilizing lives. It also provides dedicated facilities for families, men, women, unaccompanied youth, and LGBTQ residents. In 2017, New York City spent $1.7 billion in city, state, and federal money to aid its homeless population.

In New York, rising homelessness and dwindling affordable housing have been on twin trajectories for the past two decades. From 1994 to 2012, while the city swelled by more than a million new residents, it lost 150,000 rent-stabilized apartments, putting low-income residents at particular peril in the competition for housing. The city’s homeless population also more than doubled during that time, increasing 115 percent. Between 2000 and 2014, the city’s median rent increased by 19 percent and household income decreased by 6.3 percent in real dollars. Two-thirds of households now rent, and in June 2018, median rent was more than twice the national average—$2,900, according to Zillow.

“The way you get homelessness is the gap between rent and incomes,” confirmed Steve Banks, commissioner of the city’s Human Resources Administration (HRA), who oversees the Department of Social Services (DSS) and the Department of Homeless Services (DHS). After two decades of rising homelessness, he said, the number of people housed in DHS shelters is now stable and beginning to decline as the city makes headway in “keeping people in their homes and moving homeless people out of the shelter system and into more permanent housing.”

According to Turning the Tide on Homelessness in New York City, a 2017 municipal report, new policies have indeed led to measurable progress on this front (CNY 2017a). In December 2015, HUD announced the city had ended chronic homelessness among veterans. From 2016 to August 2018, an outreach program secured transitional and permanent housing for 1,815 street homeless people. The city has opened 15 new shelters as part of a plan to close old shelters in poor condition and build 90 new ones. At the same time, the overall number of shelter facilities has been reduced by 25 percent, from 647 to 492, as new shelter options have been developed and more people are housed. Since 2014, 94,300 people have moved from the shelter system into more permanent housing, and 161,000 households have been prevented from falling into homelessness through approaches such as an enhanced rent voucher program, free anti-eviction legal services, and more supportive housing. During that same span, the city financed the creation and preservation of over 109,700 affordable homes.

Enacting Solutions in NYC

New York City is successfully using strategies such as helping nonprofit organizations buy affordable rental housing to prevent displacement, rezoning land for residential use and greater height and density, taxing unused land at a higher rate, and investing in modular micro-apartment buildings. Deputy Commissioner for Development Molly Park, who oversees the Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) division, offered a word of caution. Homelessness is “a very nuanced situation,” she said. “We can’t draw a direct correlation between homelessness and these new affordable housing programs.”

Still, New York has much to offer other cities struggling with these complex issues.

Housing New York

The guiding plan developed during Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first term, Housing New York, defines priorities that include creating pathways to permanent housing for homeless residents, identifying more affordable housing for a growing senior population (another 400,000 are projected to reach senior status by 2040), and providing more accessible housing for people with disabilities. The mayor’s housing plan called for adding or preserving 200,000 affordable units by 2024, but the city’s accelerated pace put it on course to meet that goal by 2022, two years ahead of schedule; in October 2017, de Blasio released Housing New York 2.0, an updated plan to preserve and create an additional 100,000 units of affordable housing by 2026, or 300,000 units total at a rate of 25,000 per year (CNY 2017b).

“We have a robust system in place and we’re ramping up,” said Park of HPD. From 2014 to January 2018, the city spent $3.3 billion in direct subsidies to preserve or create a total of 87,557 affordable homes, she said. Most of this housing includes some level of construction, from light-touch rehabilitation such as replacing a boiler or roof to building new units, she said. The vast majority of homes are multifamily rentals, with some home ownership, including small buildings for between one and four families. Though publicly financed and regulated, all are owned and operated by private nonprofits, development firms, or private multifamily project owners, such as co-op tenant associations.

Some of these projects preserve existing affordable housing that was created in the 1950s and 1960s under the Mitchell-Lama Residential Program, in which the city built 70,000 rental and co-operative apartments for lower- and middle-income tenants. The program’s affordability tax credits expired, however, and nearly half of the units have exited the program, mostly because rising property values made market-rate rents more attractive than the program’s tax breaks. The city has committed $250 million to preserving 15,000 Mitchell-Lama co-ops and is working with owners to make repairs and restructure debt.

Affordable-Housing Hybrids

Housing New York 2.0 earmarked 15,000 affordable units for homeless people, and 8,948 homes have so far been created for people coming out of the shelter system. These efforts include some highly innovative models. In the Bronx, Landing Road Residence provides affordable apartments subsidized by two floors devoted to a 200-person shelter. With city support, the Bowery Residents Committee developed, owns, and operates the $62.8 million building, which provides 111 studios for formerly homeless people and 24 affordable one- and two-bedroom apartments available by lottery to the community. In the Inwood neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, the city, the New York Public Library, community organizations, and an affordable housing developer are codeveloping The Eliza, which will include 175 deeply affordable apartments, a new library branch, and a universal prekindergarten facility. Apartments will be reserved for individuals and families with a range of low-income levels, including formerly homeless people.

The city is also partnering with local nonprofits and affordable housing developers to convert temporary shelter apartments into permanently affordable housing. Since 2000, New York had used “cluster apartments” as a stopgap shelter measure, at its peak paying market rates to rent 3,600 apartments in low-income neighborhoods. In 2016, the city began phasing out cluster apartments and instead placed people in commercial hotels, where it cost the city as much as $530,000 per night to shelter 7,800 people, according to a 2017 city comptroller report. The city is now helping to buy and renovate about a third of the remaining cluster apartments and converting them to permanent housing for formerly homeless and low-income New Yorkers, taking ownership by eminent domain if necessary.

“We’re trying to make sure we’re building for very low-income families who are not in homeless shelters but are at risk of becoming homeless,” said Park. In 2017, nearly half of all new homes produced were for people with incomes at 50 percent of AMI or below, she said. “I see that as a homeless preservation tool.”

An affordable housing lottery system now accepts 700 applications for every available unit, according to Matthew Creegan of HPD’s press office. That number is a big improvement over the 1,000 applications per unit HPD received a couple years ago, he said: “Outreach, education, and the growing number of new units built have reduced the need.”

Mandatory Inclusionary Housing

To ensure that every borough would have affordable housing opportunities, the city created a new mandatory inclusionary housing (MIH) program that is activated when an area is upzoned to increase commercial use and density. A voluntary inclusionary housing policy in effect since 1987 had allowed developers a density bonus of additional height for new construction, substantial rehabilitation, or preservation of permanently affordable housing. The new MIH policy, adopted by the city council in March 2016, requires developers who want to increase floor area in rezoned areas or areas requiring special permits to provide typically 25 to 30 percent of units as affordable, for a range of income levels. Developers also have limited options to create affordable housing off-site at another location, or to pay “in lieu” fees into a housing fund.

The policy aims to increase neighborhood economic diversity by ensuring that any new housing built would also include units affordable for a range of income levels, from 40 percent to 115 percent of AMI, which in 2017 was about $93,000 for a family of three. After setting aside the requisite affordable units, the rest can be rented at neighborhood market rates.

“The mandatory inclusionary housing policy has made a difference,” said Park. By 2018, the MIH policy had created 4,000 new permanently affordable apartments, in addition to those created by neighborhood rezoning. The MIH policy is somewhat controversial, as the 51 city council members can determine level of affordability on a project-by-project basis and have the legal ability to oppose projects. At least a couple of city councilors have exercised this right, for example, by blocking building approvals on the basis of opposition to additional building height. Some major developers also have been hesitant to risk upzoning or applying for special permits that would trigger the MIH requirement. But revisions to the policy, including the introduction of fast-track approvals, have put things back on track.

Rezoning for New Affordable Housing

“We’re employing whatever land we have for housing,” said Purnima Kapur, until recently the executive director of the New York City Department of City Planning (DCP). “It becomes a balance: with limited subsidies and land available, we’re always looking for opportunities, and that typically happens with higher density.”

The city is rezoning industrial areas near established neighborhoods that have infrastructure such as sewers and “areas in which urban renewal razed affordable multifamily buildings, such as East New York, where we can up-zone and allow for bigger apartment buildings,” said Kapur. DCP is leading an integrated community planning approach with various city agencies to plan for elements such as schools, transportation, workforce training facilities, and open space. “We’re looking at a framework that would continue to allow for industrial uses as well as new mixed uses including housing,” she said. A lot of waterfront was traditionally mixed-use, “and with new tech and creative firms wanting to relocate there, we’re envisioning more housing for live-work and commercial uses.”

New neighborhood plans that allow for upzoning for mid- and higher-density are underway in East New York, Brooklyn, and Far Rockaway, Queens, among other neighborhoods, said Kapur. Two Brooklyn neighborhoods under consideration include Gowanus, an old waterfront area now enlivened by a hip mix of art and culture groups and maker industries, and Brownsville, where 900 affordable homes will be developed on multiple city sites for households including extremely low-income, formerly homeless, and low-income senior residents. The mixed-use projects feature amenities such as a cultural center, senior center, supermarket, and rooftop greenhouse.

In its search for more land, the city is trying to unlock the potential of vacant lots long considered too small or irregular for traditional housing stock to be developed with innovative smaller homes, said Kapur. It is planning affordable housing for seniors on parking lots at existing Mitchell-Lama and HUD-regulated complexes. In highly transit-accessible areas, the city is enabling the development of mixed-income buildings for small households, including studios and units with shared cooking spaces, and is relaxing some zoning restrictions on apartment size. The city is also looking at reclassifying residentially zoned vacant lots to increase the owners’ tax bills and incentivize them to develop the sites for housing.

With support from a $1.65 million Enterprise grant, the city is also helping expand community land trusts (CLTs) citywide with nonprofit organizations, so community members can own and manage development on parcels of land. The grant helped to create the first citywide land trust, called the Interboro CLT, and to educate neighborhood organizations on how they can implement CLTs in their own communities.

Modular Housing

To reduce the cost and speed up construction of affordable homes and to respond to changing demographics, Housing New York 2.0 called for capitalizing on advances in technology and innovative design to expand modular building and micro-units. HPD has launched a program encouraging advanced modular construction with updated design guidelines. Housing New York 2.0 referenced New York’s first micro-unit apartment building, Carmel Place in Kips Bay, Manhattan. Opened in 2016, the building has 55 micro units, including 8 reserved for homeless veterans and 14 affordable units that drew 60,000 lottery applicants. The 260- and 360-square-foot apartments were built with prefabricated modules transported from a Brooklyn warehouse and ‘stacked’ on a traditionally constructed foundation with ground-floor utilities. The city is piloting additional modular construction through the Build-It-Back program and has built nearly 100 single-family modular homes that cost 25 percent less than conventional construction. In May, HPD issued a competitive RFP for 100 percent affordable multifamily housing projects in East Bay, Brooklyn, that would use modular construction to further test whether the benefits of this approach are achievable at scale.

Housing for the Future

As cities across the country seek solutions to the homeless crisis and the severe shortage of affordable housing, New York City has many lessons to offer. The city has now seen several strong years of housing production that includes affordable housing, notes Kapur. But to address a root cause of homelessness, she said, the city must sustain this pace over time to keep up with demand for housing and reduce upward pressure on rents. This requires planning ahead for the capacity for future growth.

Perhaps one of the most valuable lessons for these booming cities is captured in Kapur’s reflection on the necessity of committing to long-term policy shifts and investments. “We continue to look ahead” to a city with 9 million by 2040, said Kapur, “so we’re focused on the near and distant future. We realize we need to do this on an ongoing basis. It’s not a five-year plan.”

Kathleen McCormick, principal of Fountainhead Communications in Boulder, Colorado, writes frequently about healthy, sustainable, and resilient communities.

Photograph: Low Income Housing Institute

References

Benedict, Kizley. 2018. “Estimating the Number of Homeless in America: Statistics Show That America’s Homeless Problem Is Getting Worse.” The DataFace. January 21. http://thedataface.com/2018/01/public-health/american-homelessness.

CNY (City of New York). 2017a. “Turning the Tide on Homelessness in New York City.” New York, NY: Office of the Mayor, Office of the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services, Office of the Commissioner of the Department of Social Services (February). https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dhs/downloads/pdf/turning-the-tide-on-homelessness.pdf.

CNY (City of New York). 2017b. “Housing New York 2.0.” New York, NY: Office of the Mayor, Office of the Deputy Mayor for Housing and Economic Development (November). https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdf/about/hny-2.pdf.

CNY (City of New York). 2018. “One NYC 2018: Progress Report.” New York, NY: Office of the Mayor, Office of the First Deputy Mayor (April). https://onenyc.cityofnewyork.us/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/OneNYC_Progress_2018-2.pdf.

Dougherty, Conor. 2018. “New Tax Law Likely to Curtail Affordable Rent.” New York Times, January 19, A1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/business/economy/tax-housing.html.

Mallach, Alan. 2018. The Empty House Next Door: Understanding and Reducing Vacancy and Hypervacancy in the United States. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/policy-focus-reports/empty-house-next-door.

Mallach, Alan. 2013. Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/policy-focus-reports/regenerating-americas-legacy-cities.

NLIHC (National Low Income Housing Coalition). 2018. “The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes.” Washington, DC: National Low Income Housing Coalition (March). http://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/OOR_2018.pdf.

Salviati, Chris. 2017. “Housing Shortage: Where Is the Undersupply of New Construction Worst?” Apartment List. July 26. https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/housing-shortage-undersupply-of-new-construction/.

USDHUD (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development). 2017. “The 2017 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress.” Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Community Planning and Development (December). https://www.hudexchange.info/resources/documents/2017-AHAR-Part-1.pdf.