HUD Releases Guidance on Public Housing Occupancy

By: Eric Oberdorfer, Director of Policy and Legislative Affairs

On December 20, HUD released Notice PIH 2024-40. The Notice provides best practices to achieve optimal occupancy in public housing and discusses different strategies for reducing the number of vacant units in public housing developments. Strategies include wait list management, establishing unit turnaround protocol, accurately categorizing units, marketing and outreach, identifying vacancy trends, natural disaster preparedness, matching the public housing inventory to meet the community needs, and technology. The notice also provides PHAs with additional resources to help increase occupancy. HUD has been working with PHAs to increase public housing occupancy nationally. For the notice, HUD collaborated with PHAs across the country that achieved or maintained an occupancy rate of 95.5 percent during FY 23. The notice can be found here.