US Federal housing expenditures

According to 2019 report by Congress' Congressional Research Service, there was a 108% increase in direct expenditures affordable housing programs (mainly HUD) between 1980-2018, in inflation adjusted, absolute dollar terms. Number of housing vouchers and households served have also increased substantially.

Also, this does not include the LIHTC tax credit introduced in 1986, that has become the primary source of new affordable-housing creation, building about 2.4M homes since then. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL34591.

 

Of course, rather than considering absolute dollars spent, we might ask what was the need, given growing population and housing costs; or consider that increasing portions of spending have gone into merely maintaining old public housing rather than creating new housing. Or, we could note that Federal spending in general has increased greatly since 1980, so this housing spending is declining as portion of budget. Also, post-1980 saw major cuts and reforms in other welfare programs, which may have helped push/keep many more people into poverty and housing insecurity or homelessness. Finally, we could compare to Federal tax expenditures on Mortgage Interest Deduction and other homeownership subsidies, which have increased tremendously since 1980 and now is much larger than HUD and LIHTC expenditures combined, and go mostly to high-income households.

However, given HUD budget figures and LIHTC, it seems inaccurate to say that US Federal affordable-housing support was substantially cut after 1980.

 

References 

Congressional Research Service. "Overview of Federal Housing Assistance Programs and Policy." March 27, 2019. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/RL/RL34591