HUD

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is the federal housing agency: it funds public housing and rental assistance, insures mortgages through the FHA, publishes the income limits and fair-market rents that affordability programs key to, and enforces federal fair-housing law. Much of the affordable-housing arithmetic used in city programs rests on figures HUD publishes.

For property analysis, HUD surfaces where federal money or insurance touches a building — regulatory agreements, subsidy contracts, program compliance — and in the definitional infrastructure of affordability: when a program pegs rents or incomes to area medians, the medians are HUD's. Federal designations affecting investment, like qualified opportunity zones, follow their own federal processes.