Increasing vouchers lifts people above the poverty line and allow low- income communities to spend more on basic necessities

Some 16 million renter households paid more than 30 percent of their income for housing or lived in overcrowded or substandard housing in 2019.[16] Some 5.7 million of them are working households. Because many jobs do not pay enough to enable workers to afford housing and housing costs have outpaced income growth,[17] nearly 1 in 5 working renter households paid over half their income for housing in 2018.[18] In addition, 580,000 people experienced homelessness in January 2020, according to HUD’s annual point-in-time count.[19] These housing problems are linked to cascading harm in other aspects of families’ lives, including adverse effects on children’s health, development, and educational success. Vouchers offer a proven solution and expanding Housing Choice Vouchers would help more people receive assistance when they first need it. Rigorous research shows that Housing Choice Vouchers sharply reduce homelessness, housing instability, and overcrowding. By lowering rental costs, vouchers also allow low-income people to spend more on other basic needs like food and medicine,[20] as well as on goods and services that foster their children’s healthy development.[21] They also provide people with low incomes greater choice about where they live, allowing them to make decisions based on what works best for them. When families choose to use their voucher to move from a neighborhood with a high poverty rate and lack of investments to a neighborhood with low poverty rates and more resources, research shows the children have substantially higher college attendance rates and adult earnings than peers who grew up in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty. Adults in these families have improved mental health and lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity.[22] Providing vouchers to all eligible households would lift 9.3 million people above the poverty line and cut the child poverty rate by a third, a Columbia University study estimated.[23] It also would shrink the gaps in poverty rates between white and Black households (by over a third) and between white and Hispanic households (by nearly half). And it would significantly reduce poverty disparities for people with disabilities. (See Figure 2.)