The Senate Appropriations Committee included sufficient funding for all Section 202 Project Rental Assistance Contracts (PRACs) and Section 8 Project-Based Rental Assistance renewals for fiscal year 2018 (FY18), as well as authority and funding to expand HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration for Section 202 PRAC communities in its FY18 bill, S. 1655.

Together, these three pieces of the Senate’s HUD bill represent a victory for affordable housing for older adults.

The Senate’s HUD FY18 bill rejects the Administration’s requests to freeze rents for private owners of HUD-subsidized communities and increase rents for residents, while also fully funding renewal of all PRAC and PBRA contracts. Together with the bill’s expansion of the Rental Assistance Demonstration program to include PRACs, the bill is a clear testament to the Committee’s dedication to the preservation of existing, HUD-assisted housing for older adults.

In addition to the “RAD for PRAC” authority, the bill includes $4 million for “providing additional rental subsidy for Section 202 PRAC properties converting to Section 8 contracts that will not be able to successfully convert at the current subsidy amounts.”

The RAD for PRAC expansion, as well as the $4 million, was included in the Senate’s FY17 HUD funding bill. But, the funding and policy change to help preserve 202 PRACs were not included in the final FY17 HUD funding bill. Because the RAD for PRAC authority was included in the July 21 House Appropriations Committee’s bill, H.R. 3353, there appears to be clear support for RAD for PRAC expansion in both chambers of Congress.

The Senate bill, like the House bill, includes $90 million for Service Coordinator funding. This amount is $15 million above the FY17-enacted level and should provide sufficient funds to renew all Service Coordinator grants.

In general, HUD programs fared better in the Senate Committee’s HUD FY18 bill than in the House Committee’s bill. Funding for the housing choice voucher program (23 percent of these 2.2 million homes are senior households) is significantly higher than in the Senate bill, but still potentially insufficient to maintain all existing housing through FY18. Funding for public housing is also better than in the House’s bill and the public housing program (33 percent of these 1.1 million homes are senior households), but overall funding for public housing has been billions behind actual property-level needs for decades.

Both the Senate and House bills reject the Administration’s request to eliminate funding for the HOME and Community Development Block Grant programs. The Senate bill would level fund HOME at $950 million and CDBG at $3 billion; the House bill would fund these programs at $850 million and $2.9 billion, respectively.

LeadingAge has heard from Hill staff that the FY18 bills will not be completed by the beginning of the next fiscal year (October 1, 2017). Rather, Congress is likely to pass one or more extensions of the current, FY17 funding levels until it can finalize and enact the FY18 HUD bill.