Housing subsidies diminish income inequality, while the mortgage-interest deduction, together with the real-estate-tax deduction, has the opposite effect.

This makes intuitive sense: housing subsidies disproportionately benefit low-income people, and mortgage-interest/real-estate deductions, the well-to-do. We don’t need a study from the Urban Institute to convince us of that. “Housing Tax and Transfer Programs Decrease Inequality” goes further, though: it says that the equalizing effects of housing subsidies outweigh the disequalizing impact of the tax benefits.

There’s not much comfort in that, however. Only about one in four eligible families gets federal housing assistance. Low-income housing subsidies, totaling about $36 billion in rental vouchers, are less than half the combined total of mortgage-interest ($70 billion) and real-estate-tax ($28 billion) deductions.

Still, housing subsidies and housing tax breaks deserve to be mentioned in the same breath, as part of the same policy conversation. Members of Congress who support cuts in housing subsidies don’t necessarily go along with eliminating the mortgage-interest deduction – although getting rid of that deduction has periodically gained support variously as a form of tax-code simplification or as tax fairness.