Rent is sky high, so HUD upped the value of housing choice vouchers. There’s one catch
It’s one of Aley Thompson’s least favorite statistics. As the person in charge of Tacoma Housing Authority’s rental assistance program — which includes overseeing the agency’s local distribution of subsidized housing choice vouchers — it’s a figure that can cause angst and despair.
Getting a housing voucher through THA is hard enough. It regularly requires a wait of two or three years (sometimes longer), and the agency is forced to employ a brutally cold lottery system to cull applicants, solely due to high demand. Even when someone gets lucky and their name is called, Thompson says that only 55% manage to use a housing voucher to successfully find housing.
Why? In a city rife with economic hardship where rents have skyrocketed, the vouchers — which recipients are able to use on the private market to help with the cost of rent — don’t go nearly as far as they once did.
“That’s really sad, and we want that number to increase,” Thompson told me this week, noting that many housing voucher recipients have recently experienced large rent increases, just like the rest of us. “We recognize this to be a critical problem.”
“It’s devastating,” Thompson added.
Before we go any farther, it’s important to note that my conversation with Thompson wasn’t intended to be a depressing affair. The news prompting the call was actually good: Earlier this month the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development introduced new “Fair Market Rent” rates across the country, increasing the amount that housing choice voucher programs in Tacoma could pay out by approximately 11%.
For voucher recipients, that would be a welcome development. It would also cut into that 55% number that haunts Thompson. Currently, the vouchers distributed through THA — which are based on HUD’s Fair Market Rent (FMR) calculations — are worth an average of nearly $900 a month, Thompson said. An 11% increase wouldn’t solve everything, clearly, but it sure wouldn’t hurt. THA serves roughly 2,500 households with housing choice vouchers.
As HUD Secretary Marcia L. Fudge noted in a press release announcing the increase, “These new FMRs will make it easier for voucher holders facing this challenge to access affordable housing in most housing markets while expanding the range of housing opportunities available to households.”
The only complication, as Thompson underscored, is that it’s not quite that simple.
Yes, HUD’s new Fair Market Rent guidelines will allow housing authorities like THA and other voucher programs to pay out more, but that doesn’t mean the money to make it happen magically appears.
Without an increase in overall funding from the feds — which has been proposed by the Biden Administration but has not yet survived the election year budget-making process — all this month’s HUD announcement really means is that THA now has the flexibility to divvy up the existing pie in a different way.
Thompson noted that HUD’s decision to increase Fair Market Rent was “a good thing.”
It’s just that there’s more to do, Thompson said, since an 11% increase across 2,500 local households would cost THA “millions of dollars” a year.
“Increasing the value of vouchers means that more people will be able to be successful … finding housing, and it will mitigate and stop the displacement of people whose rents are going up and their voucher isn’t enough. So it will stabilize families, and it will help us house families,” Thompson said.
“What we need to happen to really make this work is we need HUD to pay us. We need a funding increase.”
According to HUD spokesperson Vanessa Krueger, the Biden Administration’s recent budget proposal would add more than $30 billion to the housing choice voucher program, which would cover approximately 200,000 additional vouchers. Nationally, about 2.3 million households already rely on housing choice vouchers.
“Ideally, we will get more funding for the voucher program. We don’t know. But that would go toward giving more money to the housing authorities that are administering this program,” Krueger said.
Back in Tacoma, Thompson said that THA already was considering increasing the amount it pays out for housing choice vouchers — which were long known as Section 8. By law the agency could choose to pay anywhere from 90 to 110% of Fair Market Rent, Thompson said. Recently, THA has been paying 100% of FMR.
Thompson said THA’s board of directors would soon decide how much those vouchers would be worth starting in 2023. An increase is expected, one way or another.
Still, for the new Fair Market Rent guidelines to have the biggest impact in Tacoma, THA would need more than a new equation to work with, Thompson stressed.
“I have to be pretty optimistic, generally, to do this work — that things will get better. I just have to be, or I can’t come to work and motivate my team and motivate all the people that we serve,” Thompson said.
“So I am optimistic that we will get some funding, and that we’ll figure this out.”
Let’s hope.
This story was originally published September 10, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
