About the Database

The National Housing Preservation Database (NHPD) was created by the Public and Affordable Housing Research Corporation (PAHRC) and the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) in 2011 in an effort to provide communities with the information they need to effectively preserve their stock of public and affordable housing. The database provides over 5,000 users access to de-duplicated information on federally assisted housing inventory across the US at no cost. The NHPD was created thanks to the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation, Fannie Mae, and HAI Group.

The NHPD is an address-level inventory of federally assisted rental housing in the US. The agencies and departments that fund these programs have data on the individual programs that they manage, but there is no central location where all of these data are integrated. This makes it difficult to get a clear picture of the current stock of public and affordable housing in a community. It also means those who wish to preserve public and affordable housing in their community, cannot easily get the information they need about particular properties. By creating the NHPD, the PAHRC and NLIHC hope to address these issues.

The data in the NHPD come from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), and include ten federally subsidized programs. Only state and local subsidies from Connecticut, Florida, and Massachusetts are included in this database. If you are interested in adding state and local subsidy information to the NHPD for your community, please contact us.

Information on contract expiration dates, loan maturity dates, recent physical inspection scores, number of units, type of owner, and other property and subsidy characteristics are included to assist users in determining whether or not a property is at risk of leaving the subsidized housing stock. It is possible to download the entire dataset or a filtered subset of data for a city, county, congressional district, census tract, or state.

The NHPD is updated tri-annually. The data are cleaned and duplicate information is removed using an automated process in addition to manual checking. Every effort is made to ensure the information presented is as accurate as possible; however, there may be inaccuracies. You may contact us to update the NHPD with the correct information.