Affordable housing now is insufficient due to limited funding and excessive wait time

Due to limited program funding, families struggling to afford housing that manage to get off the waiting list for a Housing Choice Voucher must typically wait for years before receiving a voucher, CBPP analysis of Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) data shows. Among the 50 largest housing agencies, only two have average wait times of under a year for families that have made it off of the waiting list; the longest have average wait times of up to eight years. On average nationally, families that received vouchers had spent close to two and a half years on waitlists first, exposing many to homelessness, overcrowding, eviction, and other hardship while they wait. (See the Appendix for data on average wait times by state and among the largest agencies.) Moreover, these figures understate the unmet need for assistance. Millions of other families eligible for rental assistance never receive it because their names never rise to the top of the waiting list or they live in communities where the housing agency has closed or doesn’t keep a waiting list. Also, because of insufficient funding, local housing agencies often prioritize specific groups for available vouchers such as veterans, working families, or people fleeing domestic violence or experiencing homelessness. Setting priorities in the face of limited funding makes sense, but it means that families that need help paying for housing but fall outside the priority groups may never get assistance. For all of these reasons, an agency’s average wait for people receiving vouchers does not reflect the average wait for someone who puts their names on a waiting list for one. Significantly expanding the federally funded voucher program, which helps households with low incomes rent a modest unit of their choice in the private market, would help more people access rental assistance when they first need it instead of facing years of hardship. A top priority for policymakers in the upcoming recovery package should be to provide substantial, multi-year funding for new housing vouchers. The state and local housing agencies that administer the voucher program use virtually all the voucher assistance funds they receive, but a shortage of resources for rental assistance leaves the vast majority of eligible households without aid. In 2019, for example, 2 million households used vouchers to rent housing but more than 16 million unassisted renter households paid more than 30 percent of their income for housing or lived in substandard or overcrowded homes. (The federal government considers housing unaffordable if it exceeds 30 percent of income.) Households on agency waiting lists typically continue to experience homelessness, overcrowding, or other housing insecurity for years before receiving a voucher. And many other households needing vouchers either don’t get on a waitlist — 53 percent of agencies had closed their waiting lists to additional applicants, a 2016 survey found — or drop off without ever obtaining assistance, even after waiting years. Housing vouchers, when available, are highly effective at reducing homelessness, housing instability, and overcrowding and at improving other outcomes for families and children, rigorous research shows. They also give people with low incomes greater choice about where they live, enabling them to move to neighborhoods with lower poverty rates and more resources. Expanding the program could lift millions of people out of poverty. It also would reduce racial inequity: the housing affordability challenges that vouchers address are heavily concentrated among people with the lowest incomes and, due to a long history of racial discrimination that has limited their economic and housing opportunities, among people of color. Inadequate Funding Creates Long Waits The Housing Choice Voucher program, the nation’s largest form of rental assistance, offers a proven, evidence-based tool to address housing hardship. Currently it enables roughly 2.3 million households with low incomes to afford decent, stable housing. The family pays about 30 percent of its income for rent and utilities, a widely used standard for the amount a household can reasonably be expected to pay for housing. The voucher covers the rest, up to a cap based on HUD estimates of typical market rents in the local area.[1] Despite the demonstrated benefits of rental assistance and effectiveness of vouchers specifically, resources fall far short of need. Only 1 in 4 households eligible for rental assistance receive it due to funding limitations. Because the need is so much greater than the supply of vouchers, housing agencies establish waitlists for households interested in receiving assistance, and for each agency HUD publishes the average time someone who received a voucher had to first wait for assistance. While these data leave out millions of people in need who never get a voucher (see discussion below), they provide a useful indicator of the inadequacy of federal rental assistance funding by showing how long even people who succeed in obtaining a voucher must endure hardship before receiving help.

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The Appendix tables show average wait times for people who used a voucher in 2020 by state and housing authority.[2] Wait times among assisted households vary across the country but average close to two and a half years (28 months) nationally. Averages by state range from nine months in Nebraska and West Virginia to five years in Alabama. The average wait time for individual housing agencies is much more variable; many agencies report years-long waits. Of the 50 largest housing agencies, only two — the housing authorities in Dallas, Texas, and Columbus, Ohio, have wait times under one year (specifically, eight months). But in many cases — including in Dallas and Columbus — shorter waiting times do not reflect ready availability of assistance. Families interested in applying for assistance in Dallas must first submit a preliminary application that will then be randomly selected to be placed on the waiting list.[3] People who ultimately get assistance spend a relatively short time on the waiting list, but their overall wait time is much longer since they first had to wait to get on the list. Households in Columbus can apply directly to the waitlist but join a list of more than 25,000 others, indicating that most households seeking assistance today would almost certainly face a wait time much longer than eight months.[4] The longest wait times among these large agencies are more than seven years in San Diego County, California, where there were 56,737 families on the waitlist at the end of 2020,[5] and eight years in Miami-Dade, Florida, where the housing agency is processing applications it received during its most recent open enrollment period 13 years ago, in 2008.[6] Importantly, long waiting times are not due to agencies failing to spend their voucher funding. Over the past decade they have spent virtually every dollar that lawmakers have provided for vouchers. In a given year, an agency might sometimes spend modestly less than 100 percent of its voucher funding for the year and sometimes modestly more (by drawing down reserves), but from 2011 to 2020, agencies overall spent 99.9 percent of the funding they received, on average. Even in 2020, when the pandemic disrupted program operations, they spent 99.3 percent.[7]