Public Housing

How It Works

Public housing is rental housing owned by government. Local public housing agencies (PHAs), which are public bodies such as city or county housing authorities, own and manage the buildings. HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Housing funds and oversees them.

A PHA’s budget for public housing comes from two places:

• Tenant rents, which are tied to income and therefore low.
• Federal subsidies, through two streams created by the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998: the Operating Fund, which helps cover day-to-day costs such as maintenance and utilities, and the Capital Fund, which pays for repairs, modernization and replacement of building systems.

Congress sets both amounts in annual appropriations. Most PHAs also run the Housing Choice Voucher Program.

Who It Serves

All public housing households must be low income, at or below 80% of area median income, when they move in. At least 40% of the units a PHA fills each year must go to extremely low-income households. PHAs can add local preferences, for example for older adults, veterans, working families or people experiencing homelessness.

Residents generally pay the highest of 30% of monthly adjusted income, 10% of monthly gross income, or the housing portion of any welfare payment, with a minimum rent of up to $50 set by the PHA. Each year, a family can instead choose a flat rent, generally set at no less than 80% of the area’s fair market rent, which can benefit households whose incomes rise.

According to NLIHC’s 2025 guide, which draws on HUD data, about 1.57 million people lived in public housing as of December 2024, and 72% of households were extremely low income in 2023. Federal law also requires most adult residents to do 8 hours a month of community service or self-sufficiency activities. Adults 62 and older, many people with disabilities, and people who are working, among others, are exempt.

How to Access It

Apply to the PHA that serves your area. The PHA checks income, household size and screening criteria, then places eligible applicants on a waiting list. HUD data cited by NLIHC put the average wait at 20 months in 2023, and lists in large cities can be far longer. Some PHAs close their lists when demand is high.

History

The Housing Act of 1937 created the program to remedy unsafe housing and the shortage of decent homes for low-income families. The Housing Act of 1949 authorized 810,000 additional units over six years, alongside urban renewal and slum clearance, a target the Congressional Research Service notes was not met on schedule. NLIHC notes that projects built in that era were often racially segregated. In 1969, the Brooke Amendment capped what tenants pay at 25% of family income, the forerunner of today’s 30% standard. Over time, federal policy shifted toward privately owned housing. The 1974 Housing and Community Development Act created Section 8, and NLIHC notes that little public housing has been built since the early 1980s.

Starting in the 1990s, the HOPE VI program funded the demolition and redevelopment of distressed projects, often as mixed-income communities. HUD testimony cited by NLIHC estimated that about 200,000 public housing units were demolished between the mid-1990s and 2010, with far fewer replaced as public housing. Today, HUD’s “repositioning” policy moves more properties out of the program through demolition and sale, conversion to vouchers, and the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD). In July 2026, Public Law 119-101 removed RAD’s expiration date and raised the cap on public housing units that can convert from 455,000 to 555,000.

Limitations

• Underfunding and aging buildings. PHAs have faced shortfalls in capital funding for decades, leaving a large backlog of repairs.
• A shrinking stock. NLIHC reports roughly 884,000 units across about 2,700 PHAs as of December 2024, down from 1.1 million in earlier years. The Faircloth cap, added by the 1998 law, bars PHAs from using federal public housing funds to build beyond their October 1, 1999 unit counts, so an agency’s stock cannot grow past that level with those funds.
• Demand far above supply. Like other HUD rental aid, public housing is not an entitlement, so most eligible households cannot get a unit.
• Pending rule. A HUD rule proposed in March 2026 would let PHAs require work-eligible adults to work up to 40 hours a week and set time limits of two years or more for families that are not elderly or disabled. As of October 1, 2026, it had not been finalized.

For the full story, see Public Housing in America.