Pierce County housing agencies pay rent for folks as far away as Boston. Why?
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- Not all Section 8 vouchers intended for Pierce County families stay in Pierce County.
- Local public housing agencies sometimes pay rental aid for families even after they move.
- Departing vouchers limit the resources available for families still in Pierce County.
Federal rental assistance intended for low-income Pierce County residents sometimes continues to support households even after they have moved outside the county, including to cities as far away as Boston, Dallas and Phoenix.
It’s not only a relatively common occurrence in the Housing Choice Voucher Program overseen by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, it’s the product of a HUD-required process called portability, according to local public housing agencies that administer the voucher program.
The program, which is also known as Section 8, helps voucher-holding tenants pay a portion of rent each month to private landlords. The subsidies are distributed by public housing agencies through a finite number of vouchers and funding they receive from HUD.
Portability allows tenants, with their voucher in tow, to relocate to anywhere in the United States that maintains the program. If the voucher isn’t taken on, or “absorbed,” by their new housing agency, the old agency maintains responsibility for paying the subsidy – explaining how Pierce County vouchers can wind up in areas across the country.
In the Pierce County Housing Authority (PCHA), 162 of its roughly 3,100 vouchers were in use outside the county, the agency said in August. The Tacoma Housing Authority (THA) had 118 of its vouchers being employed beyond city limits that same month, agency-provided data showed. The THA has 5,500 total vouchers, more than 600 of which are allocated to the Housing Choice Voucher Program, the agency said. Its others are earmarked for similar but unique housing services for people in need.
The 280 total vouchers taken outside Pierce County could provide the equivalent of assistance to 359 households still here, according to a News Tribune analysis of the agencies’ figures, accounting for housing market differences.
The two housing authorities, which confirmed The News Tribune’s findings, acknowledged the effect of portability but expressed support for tenants’ freedom to move between public housing agency jurisdictions, referred to as porting out or porting in.
“I would like to emphasize that portability is an important and fundamental part of the Housing Choice Voucher program,” Amber Prentice, rental assistance director for the THA, said in an email. “Portability allows a voucher holder the opportunity to move out of their current area to another area while retaining their rental assistance. This is especially important for those who need to move due to employment, education, or medical reasons.”
Even so, portability is a “Byzantine” policy that presents intricate complications that were likely not considered by federal policymakers thousands of miles away, according to Riley Guerrero, policy and strategy manager for the PCHA.
“When it filters down to extremely particular local contexts, we are on the front lines of figuring out exactly what these laws mean in practice,” Guerrero said in an interview Tuesday.
A message left for HUD, seeking comment for this story, prompted an automatic email response that suggested the government shutdown was interrupting the agency’s ability to interact timely with reporters.
Vouchers wanted
While the ability to move with vouchers is viewed positively, vouchers are also in high demand in Pierce County.
The PCHA last opened its lottery waitlist in 2018, attracting roughly 10,000 people seeking vouchers. The list has shrunk to about 1,000 names, largely because the agency could not establish contact with most people on standby, Guerrero said Tuesday. For those still waiting, opportunities aren’t abundant. On average, program participants within PCHA’s jurisdiction use assistance for seven years and only a few hundred people annually enter and exit aid, she said.
The THA also maintains a lengthy waitlist, opened indefinitely since late last year. According to Prentice, from November 2024 through Dec. 31, 2024, there were 8,344 applications submitted to the housing choice voucher waitlist. Of those, 11 vouchers were issued in 2024.
Prentice said 5,469 applications were submitted to the HCV waitlist from Jan. 1 to June 30. Zero vouchers have been issued in 2025.
There were 6,249 active applications on the waitlist as of Oct. 29, according to the THA.
The “list is long because so many people need housing assistance and because THA’s supply of vouchers is not nearly enough,” the THA says on its website.
To preserve 129 vouchers it had committed to an affordable housing project near Tacoma Community College, the THA had stopped certain port-outs, Prentice said in a July interview. The agency couldn’t afford to let vouchers go unless the receiving public housing agency would absorb them, she said.
If absorbed, the voucher no longer continues to count against the original agency’s allotment, freeing it up again for local use. If not absorbed, the new agency bills the original agency for the costs of the housing subsidy and also receives a portion of that original agency’s fees to administer it — money that helps to pay expenses such as staff wages and other overhead.
Agencies have discretion on how to manage port-ins. They may choose to absorb to increase voucher utilization rates or reduce administrative burdens or if they have excess funding or room to grow in a low-demand market, according to Florida-based AMA Consulting Group, which has hosted webinars on public housing leadership.
Pricey departures
The Housing Choice Voucher Program is admittedly complex, the local agencies say. It’s administratively difficult, requiring housing authorities to carefully manage port-outs and port-ins, decide when and when not to absorb vouchers, ensure voucher utilization rates are met and more.
Funding isn’t necessarily adequate to cover the costs of all vouchers allocated to an agency, and even families who have vouchers aren’t always successful in using them due to factors including low rental vacancy rates, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Portability has specific rules. A voucher holder must reside within an agency’s jurisdiction for a year to be allowed to port-out. Agencies in a funding shortfall may deny tenants’ requests to move to higher rental markets.
The cost factor adds another layer of complication.
Tenants in the program pay between 30% to 40% of their adjusted monthly income toward rent, with a public housing agency covering the difference, according to HUD. PCHA and TCA officials say that rising rents within their own jurisdictions have made it difficult to utilize all their vouchers with the funding they get annually, which is calculated by prior-year spending, inflation and other factors.
PCHA’s budget authority this year is $43.2 million, while THA’s is $71.1 million, according to HUD’s HCV Data Dashboard. As a whole, 20 public housing agencies in Washington received $957 million in funding for 2025, the dashboard shows.
When a tenant moves to a more expensive area, it naturally requires more funding to cover the rent share.
“If you’re leaving us and going to a higher (cost) jurisdiction such as Hawaii, San Francisco, New York or King County, that in turn becomes a financial burden for us,” Tamara Meade, the PCHA’s deputy executive director, previously told The News Tribune.
To be clear, it goes both ways, lowering agency costs when households who retain local vouchers relocate into cheaper housing markets.
Where are people going?
Pierce County faces the “real brunt” of the issue with housing market cost differences because it borders Seattle — one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, according to Guerrero.
“The unfortunate nature of being directly south of a metropolitan center is that it drives a lot of regional migration,” she said, “and it drives a lot of regional housing costs in a way we can’t control.”
Tenants who move out of Pierce County and Tacoma most often go to King County, according to data provided by the agencies.
The per-unit cost within the PCHA’s boundaries is $1,343. The total climbs to $1,520 for their port-outs excluding King County and to $1,922 in King County, the data shows. The THA’s overall port-out costs neared $148,000 in June. If those vouchers had remained in Tacoma, the agency estimated it’d have cost about $22,000 less based on average local housing-assistance payments.
Meade said that HUD annually advertises notices for additional dollars, which can help to cover some of the cost-of-living disparities between jurisdictions.
As of August, 127 PCHA vouchers were being used in King County, according to agency data. Most others were elsewhere in Washington, while cities such as Dallas, Fort Worth, Phoenix and Montgomery had one each.
The THA had 69 vouchers in King County, 11 in Thurston County and four in Seattle, its data showed. Two vouchers each were in Orange County and San Diego. One was in Boston.
Voucher-holders also port-in into both agencies’ jurisdictions. Most households entered from King County, and some arrived from other parts of the country, according to the agencies.
The PCHA had 32 port-ins it had not absorbed as of August, it said. THA had eight.
The agencies, in addition to the rental assistance costs, receive fees to administer vouchers for those households. The PCHA was collecting more than $2,300 monthly in such fees as of August, according to agency data. For the THA, the fees break down to almost $80 per voucher, it said.
The agencies also absorbed at least 118 vouchers combined since July 1, 2024, they said.
Complexities all around
Greg Miller, a former HUD program analyst who has tracked the movement of porting tenants, found they tended to relocate to census tracts with higher opportunity and therefore more expensive housing costs, according to a 2024 paper he authored.
The Housing Choice Voucher Program, which serves more than 2 million families each year in the United States, is centrally designed for mobility, Miller wrote in Cityscape: A Journal of Policy Development and Research.
“As opposed to public housing, HCVs enable greater flexibility when housing needs change, create opportunities for households to follow jobs, and allow families to locate near high-performing schools,” he wrote.
The challenge that portability can present to public housing agencies is not a new phenomenon in housing circles. It was “a bureaucratic nightmare,” according to Congressional testimony in 2003 from Margery Austin Turner, the director of the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at The Urban Institute.
Agencies that absorbed vouchers from other localities used housing assistance that could have served a family on their own waiting list, she noted.
AMA Consulting Group called portability “one of the most misunderstood and operationally strained aspects of how we serve families” in a July blog. The consulting firm, which didn’t respond to an inquiry for this story, said that public housing agencies in high-demand areas could struggle if not resourced to handle an influx of arriving families.
While there are visible issues with portability, there are also problems with ending it, according to Guerrero.
“Portability exists because of the federal nature of this program in a lot of ways and also the federal disparities we see when we look at the wage differential between someone in Alabama and someone in Seattle,” she said. “There are a lot of folks who we don’t want to trap in areas of low housing opportunity.”
In an earlier interview, Guerrero noted that the process of moving between public housing agency jurisdictions was going to be complicated “pretty much regardless of the way” that it is administered.
“It’s going to have a lot of complexity, but it is, you know, it’s empowering for our tenant,” she said. “It’s the right thing to do, but it’s going to be very, very difficult, kind of no matter what way it swings.”
This story was originally published October 31, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
