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Abstract
This article investigates how the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program rations subsidies. HCV is the largest low-income housing assistance program in the United States. Despite the program’s size, millions of HCV-eligible households go without subsidy each year. Because the demand for support exceeds the supply of subsidies, HCV assistance is rationed through several mechanisms. These mechanisms and their relationship with the HCV system from both the client and administrator perspectives will be discussed. Implications of HCV rationing will also be discussed.
Acknowledgement
The author thanks Robert D. Plotnick, Charles R. Kerr, Evans School graduate students, Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) panel participants, and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. This discretion was given to PHAs in the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act of 1998 (Devine, Haley, Rubin, & Gray, Citation2000).
2. 24 CitationCFR 5.403.
3. Displaced households are ones that have lost their housing because of governmental action or a natural disaster (HUD, Citation2001, p. 5–1).
4. These types of households cannot gain access to the general wait list. However, if they meet the requirements of special programs (e.g., dedicated homeless vouchers) it is possible they may gain access to assistance (KCHA, Citation2015, p. 2–7).
5. This report sampled from PHAs with 250 or more units and stratified on size. Within five size strata, 15 PHAs were sampled and all PHAs with more than 8,000 units were sampled.
6. In addition to the score, families with elderly or disabled members, and displaced families, are prioritized before single-person households, and homeless referrals are limited to no more than 18 in a single month.
7. Perhaps this estimate is biased downward for wait-list households because it includes special-admission households which are more likely to have shorter waiting times.
8. This statistic comes from a 2009 agency staff telephone interview survey that included 12 PHAs that were purposively sampled because of MTW status, and the remaining 188 PHAs being sampled by strata defined by size, urbanicity,
and level of payment standard. The response rate for the survey was 88%, with 175 of the 200 sampled participating (Buron et al., Citation2010, p. 12).
9. Eligibility criteria define the attributes of who is eligible. Here, vouchers are considered distinct from eligibility criteria because the voucher explicitly names who the housing subsidy applies to.
10. Some states and localities have augmented federal fair housing protections by passing laws that make discrimination on the basis of source of income illegal. These source-of-income laws add protection from discrimination for individuals who receive cash transfers or benefits from sources other than earned or investment income. Nearly all of these laws include protection for HCV (PRRAC, Citation2013).
11. There have been various efforts to recruit and incentivize landlords to participate in the HCV program. Starting in 1998, PHAs are required to actively recruit landlords (Varady & Jaroscak,Citation2013). PHAs have discretion in determining the format of recruitment activities: orientations, informational open houses, printed information, online information, and videos are all common approaches. A few PHAs offered financial incentives to landlords: grants to address unit inspection findings; cash bonuses for leasing to an HCV household; a vacancy bonus for holding a unit previously occupied by an HCV household for another HCV household; property tax rebates for landlords who rent units in low poverty neighborhoods to HCV households (CHA, Citation2013; Cunningham et al., Citation2010; HACC, Citation2012).
12. Vouchering-out occurs when private properties that are subsidized in some way by the federal government, for example, through loan guarantees or housing assistance contracts, go into mortgage default and are taken over by HUD. If the property is deemed to be distressed beyond repair or usefulness, HUD will require that the current tenants relocate to other housing units. Tenants that meet HCV income requirements are given a voucher to facilitate quick relocation.
13. 24 CitationCFR 982.202 and 982.207.
14. An example of an ongoing effort to centralize wait-list information across all PHAs is a website associated with a private company. Through the monitoring of media and PHA websites, Affordable Housing Online maintains a listing of open Section 8 waiting lists: AHO(Citationud).
15. 24 CitationCFR 943.115–130.
16. HUD is in the process of proposing new regulations for consortia to ease reporting and auditing requirements (HUD, Citation2015b, p. 6).
17. NLIHC, Citation2013
18. Presently, most PHA plans are available as PDF documents: (HUD, undated). If HUD could fully digitize plan content, it would be much easier to search and analyze plans across PHAs.
19. HUD Form 50,058 reports household and individual demographic and economic attributes on HCV households from the point of voucher issue through exit from subsidy.
20. PIC is the Public & Indian Housing Information Center, which is the online HUD system that PHAs use to report their Form 50,058 data.