“SECTION 8” U.S. HOUSING CAN MEAN LIVING WITH ROACHES, RATS & POOR HOUSING

…New York’s Section 8 housing has roaches, rats, leaky ceilings, and many apartments in need of repair

The current HUD Secretary isn't getting the job done.

I have been wondering how the US Secretary of the Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Dr. Ben Carson, was doing these days.  Other than being in trouble for acquiring a $38,000 dining table & chairs for his HUD office, I haven’t heard much about the good Doctor Carson

The current HUD secretary had run against the president for the Republican nomination, but then he became a Trump supporter. He was then nominated for the HUD secretary position by Trump and was approved by the Republican Senate in 2017.

The reality is that it’s no surprise that a doctor like Dr. Carson has no experience in the federal housing business, and he has been a total failure at being a HUD secretary.  He was supposed to fix all the major problems of the Section 8 Housing program that was developed back in 1974, but that ain’t happening.

The concept of the program when it was developed by the US Congress, the program was referred to as the “Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program”.  It was supposed to help families move out of broken urban neighborhoods.  However, it was very poorly designed, but it was initially developed so that low income Americans could move to places where they could live without the constant threat of violence, and where their kids could attend good schools.

But somewhere along the way, “Section 8” became a name for housing that is, to most, the same as the poor public-housing properties the program was designed to help families escape.

So, how did this happen?

To begin with, Section 8 works like this: Families lucky enough to get off the lengthy Section 8 waiting lists, they are allowed to look for apartments up to a certain rent level, which varies for each metro region. This figure is called by HUD the “fair market rent”.  It is calculated by HUD every year for each metro area.  The tenant pays about 30% of their income,  and the voucher covers the rest of the rent. (This idea was based back in 1974 on the idea that families should not spend more than one-third of their income on rent.  They have only re-visited that 1974 idea recently, and the results are still not working.)  

But the fair market rent cut-off point today usually consigns voucher-holders to only live in the impoverished neighborhoods.

This occurs because of how that number is calculated: HUD draws the line at the 40th percentile of rents and they some how call that “typical”…..?  Units occupied in these metropolitan areas include far-flung suburbs with very long auto commutes and that obviously makes the Fair Market Rent relatively low.  As an example, in New York City, the Fair Market Rent for a one-bedroom apt. today is $1,249.  For New York City, one of the most expensive places to live, this is a price that relegates voucher-holders to the neighborhoods like those in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY.  Brownsville is one of the most dangerous places in the city, and it is where most of the poor public housing is located today.

Technically, those voucher holders can live anywhere in a region that meets the price restrictions.  But the normal tendency is for most people to stay in the neighborhoods that they are familiar with.  Additionally, landlords in low-income areas aggressively recruit those voucher-holders, as the vouchers are a much more reliable source of rent than other low-income tenants.  Therefore, the results are these poorest kept neighborhoods are those that are voucher holder renters.

The failings of the Section 8 program go well beyond flaws in how the program was designed, and to how the states have implemented the program.  People can argue all they want about the merits of subsidized housing, but given that Section 8 exists, it would seem advantageous for states and municipalities to take advantage of federal funds to help families find better housing.  Unfortunately, the states ignore those Section 8 neighborhoods and they leave it all up to the federal personnel that are way under staffed.

Many of these states are especially determined to keep these voucher-holders living in areas of concentrated poverty.  In addition, many people are stuck in these neighborhoods where the property owners are also very poor at keeping their building in livable conditions.

“The whole idea of Section 8 in the beginning was that it was going to allow people to get out of the ghetto,” said Mike Daniel, a lawyer for the Inclusive Communities Project.  (Daniel has sued HUD over the way it is carrying out the program in Dallas.) “But there’s tremendous political pressure on housing authorities and HUD to not let it become an instrument of desegregation.”

The results is on one side there are the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) people, and there are those landlords like our US president who in a past life, he and his father were sued and fined for not renting their New York apartments to black families, even the well-off black families.

As an example, in much of the country today, landlords can refuse to take Section 8 vouchers, even if the voucher covers the rent.  And many landlords of buildings in nicer neighborhoods will do anything to keep voucher-holders out. The result is that Section 8 traps families in those poorest neighborhoods.

In Austin, TX, it was found that there were plenty of apartments around the city that voucher-holders could afford. But only a small portion of those apartment owners would actually rent to voucher-holders.

The Austin Tenant’s Council, found that 78,217 units in the Austin metro area—about 56% of those surveyed, had rents within the Fair Market Rent limits. But only 8,590 of those units accepted vouchers and they did not have minimum income requirements for tenants. Most were located on the east side of Austin, in high-poverty areas, with under-performing schools and much higher crime rates.  Another problem is that this study that came up with these numbers, it only looked at apartment complexes with at least 50 units.

“Families don't have very many choices as to where they can actually use their voucher,” said Nekesha Phoenix, the Fair Housing Program Director at the Austin Tenants’ Council. “Although there are properties north and west that they could actually afford to live in, they can't do it because the properties won't take the voucher.”

Here is an example of the problem in Austin.  The brown and red dots represent apartments in Austin that cost Fair Market Rent or less. Red dots represent the apartments that would actually accept Section 8 vouchers. Austin’s west side, with all the brown dots, is wealthier and has better schools, but brown dots do not take vouchers, so there is zero options for voucher-holders.

Some cities have tried to prevent this situation. Last year Austin passed a “Source of Income” ordinance that prohibited landlords from refusing to rent to people solely because they have a voucher. And 12 states, as well as the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Chicago, and Philadelphia have all adopted the same program.

But in Austin, the landlords successfully pushed back on the ordinance. The Austin Apartment Association sued the city over the ordinance, asking for an injunction to block it. The apartment owners say that being forced to accept Section 8 meant more paperwork, unreasonable lease terms, and “burdensome inspections”.”  The inspections were because of the property owners that don’t keep up their properties and these landlords have to be kept in- line.  Therefore, the Section 8 properties are required to be inspected more on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, after a district judge left the law standing, the Texas legislature in May went ahead and passed a bill banning any municipality from passing a “Source of Income” ordinance. Source of Income discrimination will once again become legal in Austin when the state law goes into effect next September.  The NIMBY people win again.

“A housing authority that on its own sets out to use housing choice voucher as an instrument of desegregation would be brought to its knees by the elected officials of the cities that they’re in,” An Austin Program Director said.

Why do some landlords try so hard to attract voucher-holders and others try so hard to avoid them?

Section 8 tenants pay the rent reliably and stay in their apartments longer than market-rate tenants, this is according to Isabelle Headrick, the Executive Director of Accessible Housing Austin!, who is also a property owner landlord. Though the apartment owners’ lobby had said that Section 8 requires landlords to sign a 400-page document and makes it more difficult to evict tenants, Headrick says that is totally wrong and the contract is only 12 pages, and that the inspections required are “no more difficult than what a responsible landlord should be doing anyway.  Having Section 8 tenants makes my job easier, not harder,” she said.

However, in Dallas, the Inclusive Communities Project found that some landlords who owned many units throughout the city would rent to voucher-holders in low-income neighborhoods, but not in high-income neighborhoods, even if the tenants could afford both apartments. Though the landlords would say they refused the vouchers because they didn’t want to deal with the paperwork, housing advocates say that property owners don’t want Section 8 minority tenants in their buildings because they might drive away market-rate tenants.

The Inclusive Communities Project sued HUD over the way it calculated Fair Market Rents in Dallas. It is now trying to make an arrangement with Dallas-area landlords so that it can rent apartments from them and then sublease them to Section 8 tenants, taking away landlords’ excuses for not wanting to deal with Section 8 paperwork.

The idea that Section 8 people should be required to stay in areas of slum and blight, at some point, that’s just another way to racially segregate.

Voucher-holders in Austin have such a hard time finding housing that they need to ask for multiple extensions to find housing. The landlords know that the potential tenants will lose their voucher if they don’t use it in 60 to 90 days.

David Wittie, a voucher-holder in Austin, ran into this problem when he was looking for a new place last year.  Wittie called around and found a few places that said they took vouchers. But by the time he got on a bus and arrived at the apartment building to sign a lease, they said the units were rented.  Wittie, who has been in a wheelchair since he contracted from polio in 1956, said that he had to ask for three extensions before he finally found a place.

“All I wanted was to find a nice place to live,” he said.

Rufus Jones, a 51-year-old visually-impaired voucher-holder, had to look for a new apartment two years ago when the building where he’d lived for 13 years was sold to a new owner who quickly raised the rent.

After months of searching, Jones moved into a place that soon became nightmarish when he discovered it was infested with cockroaches. The apartment was located in a noisy building where the hot water often didn’t work and where the sewage pipes leaked, but the final straw came when a roach crawled into Jones’s ear when he was sleeping and he had to go to the ER to get it out.

A HUD study found that public housing authorities are significantly underfunded when it comes to managing Section 8. operations costs.  Those funds have been limited by Congress and HUD is asking Congress to consider changing the limits on administrative costs for voucher programs.’

“We want to give households choice, choices that help them in improving their lives,” an administrator said.

But all these issues have been driven by the lower supervisory level of HUD personnel.  This isn’t the direction that is coming from the HUD Secretary.   Here is what the good Doctor Carson has proposed:

That Millions of families living in federally subsidized public housing should have to pay more for rent under the Trump administration proposal. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is asking Congress to raise the rent paid by public housing residents to 35% of income from the current 30%.  But the plan would also eliminate income deductions that currently lower the rent.

Rents would be evaluated every three years instead of annually. This is according to a statement by HUD, and these rent increases will not affect the elderly or disabled.

So, Carson isn’t doing anything but asking the poor to pay more of their income, while he takes away the rent deductions they currently receive.  Therefore, the landlords will do better by eliminating the renter's deductions and the renters are required to pay more of their income.  All this while nothing is being done to deal with the properties being maintained, nor are there more people being added to the HUD teams to stay on top of the landlords.

If Section 8 can be fixed, it’ll be money well spent, but this Carson proposal is not the way.  The government already spends billions of dollars each year creating a program that, for some families, allows them to look for better places to live.

But what’s the point of offering the poor a housing program, if for most of the users, there’s nowhere to choose from that is safe to live?

Copyright G.Ater  2018