BERKELEY: The California Tax Credit Allocation Committee (CTCAC) has reapproved the use of an opportunity map developed by the Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI) and its partners, California Housing Partnership and the Terner Center for Housing Innovation for 2025.
OBI and its partners have been working with CTCAC and the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) on annually updating the map since 2017, which guides the siting of affordable housing using the federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program.
The purpose of the map is to advance two specific Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) objectives - increasing access to opportunity and replacing segregated living patterns with integrated and balanced living patterns.
To advance these objectives, the mapping methodology is designed to identify areas in every region of the state whose characteristics have been shown by research to support positive economic, educational, and health outcomes for low-income families, while also identifying areas that are both racially residentially segregated, and high poverty.
The focus of this year’s update process was reducing instability in annual updates, which led to a new approach of using a three-year rolling average of education indicators – reading and math proficiency, high school graduation rates, and student poverty – instead of a single year of data. The three-year rolling average allows real changes to emerge in map updates over time while increasing year-to-year stability in indicator measurements and categorization in the Map.
This year’s update also introduces enhanced functionality to the mapping interface, allowing stakeholders to directly analyze LIHTC siting patterns for incentive-eligible projects within the tool. These improvements make it easier for users to explore siting trends and assess the impact of policies linked to the Opportunity Map. While the policy's adoption has increased the siting of large-family LIHTC housing in higher-resource areas statewide, lower-resource areas continue to account for more production of affordable housing for families compared to other neighborhood categories in the Opportunity Map when considering both 4% and 9% LIHTCs.
The re-adoption of the map demonstrates California’s continued commitment to using federal LIHTC program funding to address racial segregation and economic isolation of low-income families to the detriment of these families’ life outcomes. Prior research by OBI found that the LIHTC program as administered in Texas, for example, had promoted and perpetuated racial residential segregation.
The mapping project was spurred following a 2017 investigation by OBI that found the majority of LIHTC resources for low-income housing in the Bay Area were being directed to low-income neighborhoods, and that only a small percentage of low-income housing was being constructed in high-opportunity areas. State agencies adopted the first opportunity map in 2018, and OBI and partners have since convened annually to update the map.
The 2025 Opportunity Map and previous maps, along with methodology and summary datasets, are available on CTCAC's website.
