Poor families' fate rests in Republican hands
Sheryl McCarthy
Newsday (Long Island NY)
November 22, 2004
In the spirit of "let's hurt a bunch of poor people," consider what the Bush administration has been trying to do to the Section 8 housing program.
Aside from the aging public housing projects that were being built up until the 1970s, Section 8 is pretty much the only federal program that provides housing to low-income people.
Started in 1974, Section 8 subsidized the private construction of low-income apartment buildings - known as project-based Section 8 buildings - by guaranteeing rent subsidies to all the tenants in those buildings. It also gave vouchers to low-income individuals and families. The vouchers allowed them to find decent, moderate-priced housing on their own, and the government agreed to pay a portion of the rent. Tenants would pay no more than 30 percent of their family income.
About 2 million families nationwide have vouchers, including 110,000 in New York City and 12,000 on Long Island. But the Bush administration has proposed cutting the program by 30 percent over the next five years, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and by even more over the long term, according to other housing advocates. Instead of paying the actual cost of the existing rent vouchers, Bush's budget proposal for 2005 is to cut Section 8 funding by about $1 billion. The plan would freeze the basic funding at the 2004 level and provide a small inflationary increase each year - though not related to the actual increase in rents.
In the long term, low-income housing advocates say, this would mean that New York City might have to lower the maximum rents that the vouchers would cover. In a city where rents are constantly rising, voucher holders would have to look for cheaper apartments in order to use their vouchers. The tenants might also be asked to pay a larger portion of their rent.
This has already happened in other cities that, unlike New York, didn't get a waiver from a new funding scheme announced by the Department of Housing and Urban Development last spring. HUD also wants to recalculate the fair market rents - the maximum rent that the vouchers will fund - in some of the pricier housing markets. Calculating rents at unrealistically low rates means there would be a bigger gap between actual rents and what Section 8 would pay. Either the tenants or the local housing authority would have to make up the difference.
Bills that were before the House and Senate last week rejected the Bush administration cuts and provided for increases in Section 8 funding - although the House bill still set funding below what the existing vouchers are expected to cost in 2005, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. At the time of this writing, the two houses of Congress were wrangling over what the final funding bill would look like.
There's a lot of irony in the fact that Section 8 was part of the Nixon administration strategy to get the government out of the housing business by letting families find apartments on their own, and supporting private landlords. The program has been one of the most effective ways of helping low-income people to afford housing. The proposed cuts also come at a time when rents are rising and when the country has already lost hundreds of thousands of units of project-based Section 8 units - as the landlords' contracts with HUD expired.
In New York City, 250,000 people are on the waiting list for Section 8 vouchers. Ideally the federal government should resume subsidizing the building of new low-income housing. At the very least, it should continue to fully fund the existing vouchers.