Un-Housing the Poor

In December 1998, Tarrah Leach's life finally hit rock bottom. She was barely 17 years old, already a mother of two small infant daughters, and hiding out in a domestic shelter. She'd been married only a year, a difficult year that the teenage couple spent first in a homeless shelter and then in a small public housing apartment in Lancaster, Ohio, a town some 32 miles southeast of Columbus. And though Leach still loved her childhood sweetheart, she could no longer tolerate his abuse and beatings. So she took her kids and walked out the door without a dollar to her name.

"By the time, I’d left him, I had this new family with no money and no home to help me raise them," Leach says.

Help, however, was around the corner. Leach received a fresh start in life courtesy of the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program. The federal assistance program enabled Leach to rent an affordable apartment in a safe neighborhood, a decision that she says saved her life. After waiting for two months, her family was able to move into a quiet two-bedroom trailer, which she rented for a reasonable $100 a month thanks to the HUD voucher, as opposed to the market rate of $425.

The Section 8 program, created in 1974 during the Nixon years, offers poor families a housing voucher to rent an apartment or home put on the market by participating landlords. With the voucher, a family only has to pay 30 percent of their adjusted income toward the rent, with the local housing authority paying for the balance with HUD money. Under HUD regulations, 75 percent of a housing authority’s vouchers must go to families making 30 percent or less of the median income in their area.

The program represents a vital lifeline for families with extremely low incomes who get the opportunity to move their family out of public housing in poor and often dangerous neighborhoods. Currently, more than two million families use Section 8 vouchers to pay a subsidized rent.

The Department of Housing, however, is planning to cut that lifeline.

Last month, Congress began hearings on two bills -- one each in the House and Senate -- that threaten to reorient federal assistance away from the families that need it most. Specifically, the legislation would double Section 8’s existing median income cap to 60 percent, thereby allowing families who earn more to qualify for these vouchers.

It also removes rules which ensure that families in serious need receive the most assistance. Under the new measure, local housing authorities are free to award up to 90 percent of their vouchers to applicants that qualify under the raised income cap -- allowing them to dole out the majority of vouchers to families who earn more and therefore pay more of the rent.

HUD, which drafted both pieces of legislation, is framing this reorientation as a response to the rising costs of a program that has jumped from $11 to $15 billion over the past three years. Last year, HUD cut millions in Section 8 funding but restored some of it after an outcry from housing authorities who said they were being asked operate the program but deprived of the funding required to do it.

If HUD is successful in its latest bid, success stories like Tarrah Leach will likely become a faraway memory. Thanks to Section 8, Leach was able to get her GED even as she worked at WalMart, and later attended nursing school on her days off. She eventually graduated with honors and got her nursing license.

"I still would have been struggling, I wouldn’t have been able to go to school, to get the nursing job I have now—not to mention paying rent, the bills and taking care of my kids," she says. "It wouldn’t have happened without that voucher."