Apartments in NoMa by Elvert Barnes licensed under Creative Commons.

As the pandemic exacerbates the nation’s housing crisis, President Biden and Acting Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Marcia Fudge have declared support for opening up Housing Choice Vouchers (also known as Section 8 vouchers) to every eligible American.

“Housing vouchers are the best, most flexible tool in our arsenal,” when it comes to tackling housing equity issues, Dr. Eva Rosen, a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, told GGWash in an interview. By expanding them to all eligible recipients, she continued, and increasing their value to allow renters to live in more well-resourced neighborhoods, it could prevent lower-income renters from being restricted to underinvested, and often red-lined, areas as they have often been historically.

Currently, to qualify for a Housing Choice Voucher an applicant must earn no more than 50% of their area’s median income, also known as the AMI, or Median Family Income (MFI), which was $126,000 for a family of four in DC in 2020. Once they have applied and are approved, their local housing authority can grant them an available voucher to cover a portion of their rent, paid directly to their landlord. By law, a public housing authority (PHA) must provide 75% of its voucher to applicants whose incomes do not exceed 30% of the area median income.

DC, as well as other jurisdictions across the country, has its own additional form of housing vouchers issued through the Local Rent Supplement Program (LRSP) which assists families below 30% of the AMI.

As it stands, the Housing Choice Voucher program faces multiple challenges including landlords engaging in rampant, though illegal, discrimination against voucher holders, and the fact that there are not nearly enough vouchers to go around nationwide due to federal funding constraints. There is also a great deal of social stigma levied toward voucher holders, in many ways similar to the racialized “welfare queens” myth of the Reagan era, which generated suspicion that those reliant on social services were simply taking advantage of the system. However, continued demographic and financial analyses of voucher holders and public housing residents paint a far more nuanced picture. For instance, over a third of voucher holders identify as white, and of those with non-disabled heads of household, 62% are working, according to 2015 data from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

As of 2017, 5.3 million Americans were using vouchers to afford their housing, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. However, CBPP estimates that only 25% of eligible households are actually receiving voucher assistance. Applicants can remain on waitlists for as long as 10 years in some cases, and once waitlists grow too large to remain manageable, housing authorities will often close them until more vouchers become available. The DC waitlist, for instance, has been closed since 2013, when it hit 70,000 individuals and families.

Apartment buildings in the Shaw neighborhood, in DC. Image by Ted Eytan licensed under Creative Commons.

The Biden Administration’s proposed expansion would increase funding for Housing Choice Vouchers, boosting the available supply and theoretically eliminating lengthy waitlists. Because the vouchers are assigned to individuals or families, versus specific properties, they are designed to offer a faster and more geographically flexible solution to housing security than relying solely on new construction of affordable housing units in a given area.

Implementation, however, is slightly more complicated. In FY2020, Congress appropriated $23.8 billion in funding for Housing Choice Vouchers. The overall enacted HUD budget in FY2020 was $56.5 billion.

Biden’s housing plan calls for $640 billion in spending over 10 years, but does not break down how much of that would go toward ensuring the Housing Choice Voucher program is “fully funded.” However, a Congressional Budget Office estimate from 2015 found that expanding vouchers to all individuals earning no more than 50% of AMI would support “about 8 million additional households and would cause federal spending to increase by $410 billion from 2016 through 2025.”

With the coronavirus pandemic entering its second year, the number of people eligible for vouchers has increased significantly due to spiking unemployment and approximately 1 in 5 households are behind on rental payments. While President Biden has extended the federal government’s eviction moratorium through March 31, millions of renters remain at risk due to the fact that protection is not automatic (renters need to present a signed copy of the order to their landlord) and enforcement is inconsistent across various states.

With an “eviction tsunami” looming, voucher expansion seems like an immediate fix, but there are concerns that scaling up a program already facing equity challenges could worsen those problems.

“The main thing you’ll run into is suddenly you’ll have a lot more money at the lower end of the market, and landlords are going to raise their prices to capture as much of that as they can, especially if there isn’t more [housing] supply coming online,” Shane Phillips, an urban planner and Housing Initiative project manager at the UCLA Lewis Center Housing Initiative, told GGWash in an interview.

Dr. Rosen also noted that some more predatory landlords may actually prefer tenants with vouchers as their rent payments will be more stable. Once those tenants are in place however, some landlords will de-invest in their properties in order to extract higher profits, leaving renters in sub-par conditions. While Housing Choice Voucher holders can technically leave a bad housing situation and take their voucher with them, broader discrimination against voucher holders, employment circumstances, or other factors can make it precarious to do so, she said.

On the flipside, by expanding vouchers to more people they could become a less stigmatized part of the market and reduce the profitability of exploiting loopholes. “Especially in places like DC, or Los Angeles, or other high demand places with pretty low vacancy rates you’re going to see…fewer people leaving the region than currently are because they won’t be forced out by rising rents,” Phillips said.

Given the inequalities in the current system, scaling up vouchers drastically could risk amplifying some of the issues mentioned above, particularly de facto redlining. The Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs) rule, which requires voucher values to be set according to neighborhood as opposed to at the metro level, is an attempt to correct this. To Dr. Rosen’s point, this allows voucher holders more opportunity to move into better-resourced, more expensive areas. However, the catch is that the rule is not mandatory everywhere. While it has been implemented in DC, Maryland, and Virginia, for example, it doesn’t apply in large swaths of the country.

Washington is one such state where SAFMRs are not currently in place, but it is piloting an alternative approach. In 2018, the Seattle and King County Public Housing Authorities piloted a new approach to distributing housing vouchers in an attempt to break red-lining patterns that kept them out of better neighborhoods. The PHAs offered a test group of voucher holders information about which neighborhoods had better schools, employment opportunities, and other resources, and assigned them a navigator who would personally help them through the process of applying for apartments or additional financial resources. According to Raj Chetty, an economist who worked on the pilot, the share of voucher holders that moved into “high-opportunity neighborhoods” increased from 14% to 54% in a little over a year.

That said, expanding or otherwise enhancing vouchers is but one solution to a housing crisis with many moving parts.

“You can’t just do one thing, and you can’t even just do one category of thing,” Phillips said. So while housing advocates are broadly supportive of expanding vouchers, many note the need to continue pushing for regulatory changes to refurbish and expand existing public housing, finance more mixed-income developments, or require more affordable units as a percentage of new construction, among other measures, in order to stabilize and reduce housing costs nationwide.

President Biden’s executive orders on racial inequality and Acting Secretary Fudge’s plans to tackle restrictive zoning, expand public housing supply, and increase tax credits for first time home-buyers are steps in that direction, according to the administration.

“I understand that there are people who think we are doing more than we should. I believe we are not doing enough,” Fudge said in her Senate confirmation hearing.

“We know that segregation and racial inequity were created by the government - federal mortgages that explicitly said you were not allowed to sell your house to a person of color. That is how we constructed racial segregation,” Shaun Donovan, former HUD secretary under President Obama told NPR. “We need to make sure that those who have started behind in the race are given a chance to catch up. And that’s why we need to make sure that this is an active role that the federal government is taking.”

In DC, on February 16 Mayor Muriel Bowser announced the federal government had approved the District’s application for a Section 108 loan guarantee, establishing a $38.8 million revolving loan fund “that will provide third party loans for the preservation of hundreds of affordable housing units.” The fund will be used to acquire and rehabilitate housing for residents earning no more than 80% of the Median Family Income (MFI), or $100,000 for a family of four.

In addition to the Section 108 loan guarantee, Mayor Bowser’s FY2022 budget proposal maintains and sets aside additional funding for the refurbishment of existing public and temporary supportive housing properties, allocates $46.1 million in federal funds for rental housing and related nonprofit project support, and includes a target of producing 36,000 new housing units by 2035, 12,000 of which would be designated as affordable.

Morgan Forde is a freelance journalist covering architecture and urban history. Originally from Seattle, she has lived in DC since 2012. She currently serves on GGWash's edit board.