Case Study: Bringing EV Charging to an Affordable Housing Community

Maple Court is a 120-unit affordable housing community in California's Central Valley, built and operated by a nonprofit developer under the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, or LIHTC, program. LIHTC is the largest source of affordable rental housing financing in the United States, and properties built with it must keep rents below set limits for decades. The lot offers one assigned parking space per unit.

Over two years, a handful of residents began buying used electric vehicles. Falling used-EV prices and California's Driving Clean Assistance Program, which helps lower-income buyers with financing and grants, put EVs within reach for working families. But Maple Court had no charging at all. Residents resorted to running extension cords from ground-floor units, a fire and trip hazard the property's insurer would not tolerate.

The nonprofit owner faced a hard constraint. Affordable housing runs on thin operating margins, and LIHTC rules cap rents, so the owner could not raise rent or levy a special assessment the way a market-rate HOA might. Replacement reserves were modest. For the project to happen at all, it had to be funded almost entirely by grants and incentives.

Maple Court's location worked in its favor. Under California's CalEnviroScreen tool, the surrounding area qualifies as a disadvantaged community, and the property sits inside a low-income census tract. That designation unlocks the most generous tier of nearly every EV charging program, whether federal, state, or utility-run.

The federal piece is the 30C tax credit, formally the Alternative Fuel Vehicle Refueling Property Credit. It covers 30 percent of installation costs, up to $100,000 per charging port, when the property sits in an eligible low-income or non-urban census tract and the installer meets prevailing-wage and apprenticeship rules. Because the nonprofit owner has no federal tax liability to offset, it used the Inflation Reduction Act's elective pay provision, also called direct pay, to receive the credit as a cash payment from the IRS.

State and utility programs filled the rest. California's Communities in Charge program, the statewide successor to the regional CALeVIP rebates, pays higher per-port rebates for Level 2 chargers at multifamily properties in disadvantaged communities. The local electric utility's multifamily make-ready program covered the make-ready infrastructure, meaning the trenching, conduit, wiring, and panel work that feeds the chargers, at the top reimbursement rate reserved for disadvantaged-community properties.

Paying for the hardware was only half of the equity question. The owner also had to make sure that day-to-day charging stayed affordable for residents and did not quietly raise the cost of housing, something LIHTC compliance does not permit.

For billing, the property chose networked Level 2 chargers so each resident pays only for the electricity they actually use, tracked through the charging software with an RFID card or phone app. The per-kilowatt-hour rate was set at $0.22, just above the property's own utility rate, enough to cover the network subscription and payment-processing fees but not to generate a profit. The board deliberately avoided a flat monthly fee, because a flat fee penalizes residents who charge only occasionally.

Access was designed to be shared rather than exclusive. Instead of assigning ports to specific units, all 16 ports serve the whole community on a first-come basis, with a four-hour session limit enforced by the software so a finished charge frees the spot for the next resident. Load management software caps the total electrical draw across all ports, which let Maple Court avoid an electrical service upgrade that would have added more than $40,000 to the budget.

The slowest part of the project was not the physical installation. The utility make-ready process, which covers designing, approving, and building the infrastructure that feeds the chargers, took about four months from application to completed work. Local building and electrical permits added roughly eight weeks, though some of that ran in parallel.

Once the make-ready infrastructure was energized, the contractor mounted eight dual-port stations across the surface lot in about two weeks. Throughout the project, the nonprofit kept residents informed with plain-language notices in both English and Spanish. Poor communication is one of the most common reasons multifamily EV projects stall or draw complaints, and the owner treated it as part of the job.

From the first incentive application to the first charging session, the project took about nine months. The single biggest schedule saver was filing the utility make-ready application early, before the hardware was finalized, so the longest-lead-time item was already moving while other decisions were still being made.

Adoption climbed quickly. Within twelve months, 24 households at Maple Court owned an electric vehicle, up from 9 before the project began. The 16 shared ports handled that demand comfortably because of the session limits and shared-access rules, though a short waitlist for guaranteed evening access started to form.

The savings for residents were substantial. Households charging at the property paid an average of $28 to $34 per month for electricity, compared with the roughly $110 to $140 per month those same households had been spending on gasoline. For families on tight budgets, a swing of $80 or more each month is real money.

The property itself spent under $18,000 net from reserves. The small per-kilowatt-hour markup recovers a modest amount each month, which funds the network subscription and a maintenance reserve for the chargers. With a waitlist forming, the owner is now planning a second phase of eight more ports using the same funding model.

The clearest takeaway is counterintuitive. Affordable housing properties in disadvantaged communities are often among the best-funded EV charging candidates in the country, not the worst. Disadvantaged-community status unlocks the highest tier of utility, state, and federal incentives, and elective pay lets nonprofit and government owners capture tax credits they otherwise could not use at all.

Just as important, the project worked because affordability was built into the design from the start, through pay-per-use billing, no impact on rent, and shared access for the whole community. For LIHTC properties and other regulated affordable housing, the right frame is to treat EV charging as a resident amenity that must never raise the cost of housing.