Rental Assistance Demonstration

The Rental Assistance Demonstration is a federal housing program that was enacted as part of the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2012,[1] and is administered by the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD). Broadly, the purpose of the Rental Assistance Demonstration (or RAD) is to provide a set of tools to address the unmet capital needs of deeply affordable, federally assisted rental housing properties in order to maintain both the viability of the properties and their long-term affordability. It also simplifies the administrative oversight of the properties by the federal government. Specifically, RAD authorizes the conversion of a property's federal funding from one form to another, where the initial form presents structural impediments to private capital investment and the new form (project-based section 8) is not only familiar to lenders and investors but, since its enactment in 1974, has leveraged billions in private investment for the development and rehabilitation of deeply affordable rental housing.

RAD has been amended by four pieces of legislation:

  • Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014[2]
  • Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, 2015;[3]
  • Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016.[4] and
  • Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017.[5]

Initially, Congress capped the number of units that could be converted under RAD at 60,000, but by October 2014 it was reported that HUD had received applications to convert more than 184,000 units.[6] In FY2015 Congress reauthorized RAD and increased the cap to 185,000 units.[7] An independent assessment of the program from its inception through the autumn of 2015 found that, using existing resources of $250 million, the program had leveraged approximately $2.5 billion in capital investment. In FY2017, Congress again reauthorized RAD, once again increasing the cap, this time to 225,000 units. It was raised again in FY2018 to 455,000 units.[8]

  1. ^ Public Law 112–55, enacted November 18, 2011
  2. ^ Public Law 113–76, enacted January 17, 2014
  3. ^ Public Law 113–235, enacted December 6, 2014
  4. ^ Public Law 114–113, enacted December 18, 2015
  5. ^ Public Law 115-31, enacted May 5, 2017
  6. ^ "Private Money Successfully Fixing Public Housing -- Rooflines". Retrieved 13 July 2016.
  7. ^ "Statutory authorization of the Rental Assistance Demonstration : Department of Housing and Urban Development Appropriations Act, 2012 : (Public Law 112–55, as amended by Public Law 113–235)" (PDF). Nhlp.org. December 16, 2014. Retrieved 2016-07-16.
  8. ^ HUD published a Federal Register notice on August 23, 2017, to address how this increase would be implemented.