JULIA KEHOE
‘Dismantling’ program

A controversial proposal to cut and drastically change the federally funded housing program known as Section 8 could hurt thousands of low-income individuals in the Bay State and across the country, according to housing advocates.

In Massachusetts alone, more than 8,600 households that currently use Section 8 vouchers to rent privately owned apartments could lose government assistance and housing next year if the proposal is approved. In four years that number could escalate to 27,500.

The budget proposal, presented by the Bush administration in early February, cuts funding for Section 8 in 2005 by more than $1 billion below the 2004 level, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The funding reduction means that the number of families served by Section 8 would be cut by approximately 250,000 nationwide. All the people who currently use vouchers would have to pay an average of $800 more per year for rent to continue being served by the program, the center projects.

The cuts are only one component of the proposal that troubles housing advocates. The administration also wants to “deregulate” the program and offer block grants to local public housing authorities that distribute the vouchers. Currently, housing authorities receive a set number of vouchers, instead of grants.

The proposed cutbacks and changes are deeper and more harmful to low-income families, the elderly and the disabled than any pitched during the program’s history, according to several observers.

“They call it deregulation. I call it dismantling the program,” said Julia Kehoe, executive director of the Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership.

Under the program, which has existed for 30 years, tenants must use 30 percent of their income to pay for rent and the remainder is paid by the government. However, under the proposed changes, local public housing authorities would be able to ask tenants to use more of their income for rent.

Housing authorities are also required to distribute 75 percent of the Section 8 vouchers they receive to households earning 30 percent or less of the area median income, but the proposal seeks to remove that cap.

“Section 8 is the only housing program that’s targeted to extremely low-income people,” said MBHP’s Kehoe. “This does away with that.”

The administration argues that the changes would give housing authorities more control and flexibility in providing the vouchers, and help them continue to serve the 1.9 million families currently in the Section 8 program.

The changes would give public housing authorities the ability to adjust their programs to address changing needs of their communities and better control increasing voucher costs, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The average cost of each voucher has increased 23 percent in the last two years.

Yet advocates like Kehoe fear that the budget cuts, coupled with the “deregulation,” would push public housing authorities to provide vouchers to higher-income households that would be able to contribute more toward their rent share. Vouchers can be distributed to those earning up to 80 percent of the area median income, which in Boston translates to $66,000 a year for a family of four.

The program currently serves 70,000 households in Massachusetts, and another 48,000 are waiting to receive vouchers.

Tipping the Scales

If tenants are forced to use more of their income for rent, Kehoe worries that the “poorest of the poor” would suffer the most. The average income of people who receive Section 8 vouchers from the MBHP is $11,000, said Kehoe.

MBHP has 14,000 names on a waiting list for Section 8 vouchers and stopped issuing new vouchers a year ago.

Kehoe said the voucher shortage will have a wide-reaching effect. “The lack of vouchers affects all sectors of the commonwealth, such as small property owners who rent to Section 8 tenants, businesses that are losing staff due to the high cost of living, communities coping with their growing homeless populations and the elderly and disabled struggling to stay in their homes,” Kehoe said in a prepared statement.

What’s more, both Gov. Mitt Romney and Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino have made commitments to end homelessness by establishing Interagency Councils on Homelessness and Housing. Cuts to the Section 8 program will make ending homelessness, an already tough task, even more challenging, according to housing experts.

“There’s no way you can contain homelessness, much less end homelessness, without the Section 8 program,” said Kehoe.

Linda Wood Boyle, executive director of the Boston-based HomeStart Inc., said that in the last six months of 2002 her agency was able to place 120 homeless families into housing with the help of Section 8 vouchers.

By the last half of 2003, however, HomeStart was able to help only 49 families through Section 8. Boyle is particularly worried about the effort to allow housing authorities to collect more than 30 percent of a household’s income for rent.

A person who is not homeless who receives Emergency Aid for Elderly, Disabled and Children from the state receives only $303 a month, said Boyle. “So many of our clients, people who are living on Section 8, are living on a very tight, fragile budget,” she said. “One blip on the screen can sort of tip the scale one way or another.”

A hearing scheduled by the U.S. House of Representatives Housing and Community Opportunity Subcommittee on Feb. 12 to discuss the housing budget for fiscal year 2005 was canceled. The hearing has not been rescheduled yet.

Even though there has been intense opposition so far, housing advocates acknowledge they are facing an uphill battle to prevent the cuts and changes. “The administration and Congress [are] in a real bind because they’re facing record deficits and they have to cut spending somehow,” said Kim Schaffer, outreach coordinator for the National Low Income Housing Coalition in Washington, D.C. “This is a prime program for them to do that.”

The controversy comes just as the NLIHC released a study less than two weeks ago showing that nearly 65 million low-income people – or 24 percent of the U.S. population – are experiencing housing problems. The most common housing problem, according to the NLIHC study, is cost burden. Some 55 million people are paying more than 30 percent of their income toward housing.

“This is a very radical proposal,” said Schaffer. “It would undo the compromise that came of the last bipartisan look at the program.”