Navajo Nation TribaLLy DESIGNATED Housing Entity

About Us

NHA is the largest Indian housing authority in the country, and is nearly the eighth largest public housing authority in the United States. NHA manages over 8,500 housing units including an additional 2,000 units NHA funded through sub-recipients. Since 1963, NHA has been providing public housing for the Navajo Nation, the largest Indian tribe in the country. The Navajo Nation has a land base the size of West Virginia, sprawled across three states (AZ, NM and UT), and a population of over 300,000 tribal members. From 1963 to 1996, NHA has offered public housing assistance under the Mutual Help housing program and the Public Rental program under the provisions of the U.S. Housing Act of 1937. Beginning in 1996, all federal Indian housing programs were consolidated under the Native American Housing Assistance and Self Determination Act (NAHASDA). Tribes now receive
an annual Indian Housing Block Grant to address their housing needs based on formula funding. NHA receives $80 to $90 million a year from NAHASDA. NHA has spent over $1 billion under the NAHASDA program.

Navajo Housing Facts

Statistics from the 2011 NHA housing needs assessment entitled,
“Phase II: Housing Needs Assessment and Demographics – August 2011”

• 89% of households on the Reservation are heated by wood or pellet stoves. Only 2% of homes nationwide use on-site heating.
• One in every four homes comprise of only one room dwelling.
• Over one- half of households on the Navajo Nation have no indoor water plumbing that require water transportation/hauling for domestic purposes. Over half of all families living within Navajo tribal lands have either no indoor or incomplete bathroom facilities and no or incomplete kitchen facilities. In contrast, the United States as a whole, 99% of housing units possess complete bathroom and kitchen facilities.
The indicators of safe, decent and sanitary housing, such as numbers of households with incomplete bathrooms/kitchen facilities, varied dramatically when compared between the U.S Census data and the Navajo Housing Needs Assessment study. It is important to note that the NHA Housing Needs Assessment Study is a more scientific statistical representative sampling of the Navajo population than the U. S. Census’s American Community Survey. Therefore, the NHA Housing Needs Assessment data is more valid than the U.S. Census information when it comes to the state of housing conditions on the Navajo Nation. There is a wealth of information in the NHA Housing Needs Assessment Study, and it can be downloaded from the NHA website at www.hooghan.org.

About NAHASDA

The Native American Housing Assistance and Self Determination Act (NAHASDA) was established in 1996 to assist Native Tribes and communities in addressing their housing needs on tribal lands as locally determined.  NAHASDA allows for annual congressional appropriations of Indian Housing Block Grants (IHBG) to Tribes through discretionary funding allocations.  The Navajo Housing Authority (NHA), a tribal enterprise, was designated as the tribally-designated housing entity (TDHE) to administer the housing program, provide a process for development of community and housing projects and distribute sub-grant awards to local housing partners. Since 1998, as a result of the NAHASDA funding, the NHA has been able to fund a variety of projects either partially or for the entire cost of development.