Housing subsidies are on the wane
Published 6:00 am Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Federal cuts mean fewer dollars for low-income renters, and their landlords.
Subsidized housing helped Becky Kahlvik put her life together after divorce left her a single mother. But the opportunity that kept her in safe shelter may be denied to others.
Federal cuts to the Section 8 housing program threaten such assistance – bad news for Kahlvik, now trying to studying to be a teacher.
“I have three quarters behind me and five quarters ahead to get that teaching certificate,” Kahlvik said. “I’m achieving my goal. The thing that scares me is that other people could be denied that opportunity.”
In 2000, Kahlvik and her two children, then ages 4 and 6, moved into Islandhome, the Housing Resources Board’s 10-unit transitional apartment complex. Kahlvik also received career counseling from the Helpline House staff.
Two years later, as she “graduated” from Islandhome, Kahlvik was given a Section 8 voucher to rent an apartment while she trained to be a teacher.
Section 8, established by Congress in 1974 and administered nationwide by the Department of Housing and Urban Development – and, at the local level, by Bremerton Housing Authority, with help from Kitsap County Consolidated Housing Authority – provides housing subsidies to poor families. Renters pay about 30 percent of their income toward housing, and government vouchers make up the difference. Bainbridge has 27 such subisdized units.
Now, HUD has told local authorities that the department will no longer pay the full cost of the vouchers, lowering the government contribution from 104 percent to 95 percent of fair market rent.
On Bainbridge, with rents hovering around $1 per square foot, a 1,500-square-foot Section 8 house that would rent for $1,500 now qualifies for a voucher worth $1,054 including utilities. Under the new rules, the voucher would drop to $963, giving landlords more incentive to drop Section 8 renters.
“It makes a huge difference,” said Bill Reddy, executive director of the Housing Resources Board, “because as it stands, even now, those owners are taking a cut in rental income.”
Some of the funding cuts are retroactive, a fact that local public housing authorities only learned in late May. That left the local agencies to tell some families, to whom they had already committed aid, that they would not be able to help.
For the first time, there wouldn’t be vouchers waiting for the two Islandhome families scheduled to graduate in May.
“The sky was falling,” Helpline House executive director Joanne Tews said. “No one knew what the outcome was going to be.”
After the announcement of cuts, HUD said that it would work individually with some local housing authorities to place clients. But how that will play out is still unclear, Tews says, as “the bar goes up and down.”
While the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, the group that represents the local housing authorities, has yet to issue an official statement about changes proposed for 2005, the KCCHA’s housing development director Julie Graves affirms that reaction to the cuts has been chilly.
“Local housing authorities do not support HUD’s cuts, because we know it will have a negative impact on the people we serve,” Graves said.
Among the proposed changes for 2005 outlined in a Bush administration policy paper issued last month, is reduction of housing authority operating budgets by 13 percent; giving PHAs fixed dollar amounts, rather than the current policy of funding per unit; allowing housing authorities to set minimum tenant rents, and capping the subsidies; dropping the current mandate to serve the neediest, a move that would likely raise the amount of rent a tenant would contribute; and reducing yearly inspections of all subsidized housing to inspection of just 25 percent of Section 8 units. The measures mark a trend toward federal disengagement, Reddy believes.
“From a cynical point of view, I see them wanting to take their hands off the program, by not looking for certification of families and not inspecting property,” Reddy said. “They are divesting to local housing authorities to manage as they want. Such hands-off management bodes ill for the program.”
Reddy points to the inconsistencies that would likely develop, as local housing authorities set their own standards, creating a “basically a very destabilizing environment for vulnerable families.”
For the two Islandhome families waiting to move and counting on Section 8 help, an ad hoc plan provided a last-minute reprieve; Tews sent a letter of advocacy on their behalf to BHA.
“I asked them to reconsider,” she said, “(and) if there was a limited number of vouchers to be given out, that these two families be at the top of the list.”
Both families received rent vouchers. But Tews is worried about the six families who will leave Islandhome over the next year – and any short-term solution raises the larger question: how to bring at-risk families to sustainable mental, physical and financial health without sufficient funding to underwrite their housing.
“What it means in the bigger picture is that, as households lose those Section 8 vouchers, they will then need more Helpline services,” Tews said.
Although the precise contour of the changes is still coming into focus, Reddy is not optimistic.
“There is no long-term solution,” Reddy said. “No Section 8, no Islandhome. The future looks bleak.”
