Subsidized & affordable housing
Where is subsidized and income-restricted housing across Chicago? Search your address to see your community area, or click any area on the map. Switch between HUD Housing Choice Vouchers and Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) units — both shown per 1,000 parcels so a large community area doesn’t win on size alone.
How to read this map
Vouchers counts households using a HUD Housing Choice Voucher (formerly Section 8) — the largest federal rental-assistance program. HUD reports these per census tract, so we area-weight them onto each community area (an area spanning several tracts blends their counts by how much land each contributes). LIHTC units counts the affordable rental homes built with Low-Income Housing Tax Credits since 1987, summed from the individual project locations that fall inside each community area.
The ramp is neutral on purpose: concentration of subsidized housing is context, not a good or a bad — read it alongside rent burden and the neighborhood’s other maps.
HUD suppresses voucher counts for tracts with only a handful of households, so a community area whose tracts are all suppressed shows “insufficient data” rather than a fabricated zero. Source: HUD Picture of Subsidized Households (Housing Choice Vouchers by tract) and the HUD LIHTC database, intersected with Census TIGER/Line tract boundaries for Cook County. See methodology for details.