Where Does Affordable Housing Go? LIHTC Siting Patterns and Black–Hispanic Neighborhood Concentration in NYC Census Tracts, 2003–2023

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_97How to use a DOI?

Keywords

LIHTC; affordable housing; racial segregation; fair housing; siting patterns; NYC; census tracts; Poisson PML; Qualified Census Tract (QCT)

Abstract

Most evidence on LIHTC siting is national and cross-sectional. I look at one city in detail. New York City received 1,327 LIHTC placements between 2003 and 2023, totaling 124,066 low-income units across 42,310 tract-years. The unit-weighted mean Black + Hispanic share of receiving tracts is 82.5%, against a citywide population-weighted 52.8% — a gap of 29.7 percentage points. A Poisson PML with borough and year fixed effects and tract-clustered standard errors puts the lagged Black + Hispanic coefficient at IRR = 4.48 (95% CI 2.70–7.43, p < .001): holding other factors constant, tracts with higher BH shares receive roughly 4.5 times more LIHTC units. Adding log income, poverty, renter share, and a tract-year QCT indicator barely moves the estimate. The three sub-period IRRs are not statistically distinguishable from each other (Wald χ² = 0.44, p = .80), so I cannot rule out a stable, rather than worsening, pattern over time. What does shift is the receiving footprint: it contracts from 12.0% of NYC tracts in 2003–2009 to 6.9% in 2017–2023. The same magnitude of racial concentration is now realized in a shrinking set of tracts. A QCT × BH interaction pins down where the gradient lives. Within QCT-designated tracts the BH IRR is 5.92 (3.15–11.12); outside, it falls to 2.15 (0.90–5.15, n.s.). The federal basis boost essentially bounds where racial siting gradients show up.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Shuyi Zhang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/07
TI  - Where Does Affordable Housing Go? LIHTC Siting Patterns and Black–Hispanic Neighborhood Concentration in NYC Census Tracts, 2003–2023
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 12th International Conference on Digital Humanities and Frontiers in Social Sciences (DHFSS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 900
EP  - 906
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_97
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-611-6_97
ID  - Zhang2026
ER  -