Assessing the Multifamily Housing Portfolio

Federal assistance for multifamily housing in rural areas is funded through USDA. Our work has shown the following:

• While nearly 450,000 households depended on federal assistance to live in multifamily rural rental properties with subsidized federal loans in 2002, USDA’s Rural Housing Service (RHS) did not have data to determine and quantify the portfolio’s long-term rehabilitation needs. GAO recommended that RHS undertake a comprehensive assessment of the portfolio’s long-term capital and rehabilitation needs and use the results to set funding priorities. In November 2004, RHS released its Comprehensive Property Assessment and Portfolio Analysis Report, which laid out detailed cost projections for preserving the portfolio categorized by five levels through fiscal year 2012. In response to the RHS report, Congress established the Multi-Family Housing Preservation and Revitalization demonstration program, which has preserved a number of RHS multifamily properties. A number of bills have been introduced that would make the program permanent.

  Highlights of GAO-05-382T (PDF), Full Report of GAO-02-397 (PDF)

^ Back to topWhat Needs to Be Done

Unless Congress authorizes and funds a permanent preservation program, hundreds of multifamily rural rental properties that are currently structurally sound but repairable could reach the point where it would no longer be cost effective to repair them and they could be permanently lost from the portfolio.

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Rural Housing Service

Multifamily Rural Housing

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