How to Stop Our Cruel Housing Musical Chairs Game

Make Housing Assistance a Food Stamps-Style Entitlement

Last year, two of our eviction court clients had a connection that neither was aware of.

Tasha faced eviction because her teenage sons had allegedly been causing trouble at their housing complex. But the evidence linking her sons to the issues involved was thin, so the judge ruled in her favor. (As always, I won’t use clients’ real names or reveal identifying facts about their cases.) Tasha and her family stayed in their home.

Which hurt our client Candace.

Tasha was eager to fight to stay in her home in part because it was a federally-subsidized apartment. Through the project-based Section 8 program, Tasha paid 30% of her income in rent to the landlord, and the federal government paid the difference between Tasha’s payment and fair market rent. Tasha worked several part-time jobs, including clerking at a convenience store and driving for food delivery. But low hourly pay and unpredictable hours left her income usually at about $1,400 a month. That meant her rent obligation was a little more than $400, less than half of what she would be paying for market-rate rent.

But Tasha’s gain was Candace’s loss. While on the waitlist for the same apartment complex Tasha lived in, Candace had fallen behind on her $1100 monthly rent for the home she and her kids lived in. She too worked several jobs, mostly in home healthcare. But one of Candace’s sons has a disability and needed some extra care lately, so she had not been able to work as many hours as she planned.

The building Tasha lived in was full, as was more traditional public housing buildings that would accept families like Candace’s. Our local Housing Choice Voucher waiting list has been closed for almost nine years. Like three of every four households who are eligible for a housing subsidy, Candace lost out because we do not fully fund those programs. The big picture result of that underfunding is almost one of every four U.S. renters spend at least half their income on housing, a no-margin situation directly leading to the 3.6 million evictions filed each year and record high levels of homelessness.

In our law school classroom discussions, we call the subsidized housing system the cruelest musical chairs game. The graphic I share with this article is one we show in class too. But I had to edit it to remove a few chairs: there are no publicly available graphics out there showing a musical chairs game so rigged against the contestants that three of every four of them lose.

In the short term, struggling tenants’ odds are even worse. A few years ago, NPR followed a family who, after being homeless for awhile, was finally able to get their names on a subsidized housing waiting list in their town of West Hartford, Connecticut. Their odds for getting their names picked from the housing lottery? Three percent.

Compare this crapshoot with the way our nation treats other essentials like food and healthcare. Tasha and Candace and all others who are eligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), aka Food Stamps, receive the assistance. Same goes for Medicaid. In fact, in the hallway outside the courtroom where Tasha and Candace work, for many months a worker funded by government dollars sat behind a table and colorful signs, inviting the people getting evicted to sign up for our state’s version of Medicaid.

Food stamps and Medicaid are entitlement programs. Housing assistance should be, too.

Universal Vouchers Would be a Game Changer

An excellent policy memo by the Community Preservation Corporation. The Case for Universal Vouchers, explains how we can get this done. Like earlier arguments by the Urban Institute and housing policy gurus Alex Schwartz and Kirk McClure, the memo calls for an expansion of the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program to cover Candace and everyone else who qualifies.

The HCV program, sometimes referred to as Section 8 vouchers, is our largest subsidized housing program, providing 2.3 million households with a voucher that allows them to find a private-market rental unit. The voucher-holding tenant pays their 30%-of-income share of the rent to the landlord and the federal government pays the rest.

The cost of making the program universal to all who are eligible is likely $70 billion per year. That is a lot. But, as we have pointed out here before, that sum can be more than matched by savings created by dialing back the enormous subsidies we provide wealthy landlords and homeowners. So this is no pie-in-the-sky idea. Universal vouchers were part of the Biden administration’s housing agenda, are widely supported in public opinion polling, and would match the universal housing assistance programs that are already the norm in other nations.

To be sure, universal vouchers are not the end game for making housing a fully-realized human right. Vouchers rely on the for-profit market to provide affordable housing, and the U.S. experience over the past half-century proves that cannot be a long-term solution. As argued here several times, there is no alternative to a plentiful supply of high-quality public or social housing.

Also, if a universal voucher program is to be an effective step on the path to more and better public housing, the voucher expansion needs to be accompanied by robust source-of-income discrimination rules preventing landlords from refusing to rent to voucher holders. And we need much improved administration of the current voucher process that often frustrates landlords and tenants alike .

But nearly all of our eviction court clients are on the verge of losing their homes for a simple reason: they cannot afford market-rate rent. For them, universal vouchers would be a game-changer. The Community Preservation Corporation estimates that universal vouchers would lift 2.2 million households out of poverty, and protect even more from the risk of becoming homeless.

Candace’s family would be one of them.