Work Requirements for Housing Assistance—A Deceptively Dangerous Proposal

Donald Trump wants to make major cuts in federal housing assistance.

With the deficiencies in our subsidized housing program already causing three of every four households eligible for assistance to go without, the damage caused by cutting the programs even further are self-evident. More families and individuals will have only the for-profit housing market to turn to.

Our clients lined up in eviction courts—500 households get an eviction notice every week in our community alone—show us what that means. So do those futilely trying to get a bed at an over-capacity shelter. Trump wants to cause the record number of people sleeping in cars or on the streets to increase.

You can join the National Low-Income Housing Coalition sign-on letter urging Congress to protect the Department of Housing and Urban Development staff and programs here.

What may be less obvious to some is that one of the other likely Trump proposals will cause similar levels of pain: work requirements for housing assistance recipients.

Newly-confirmed Trump HUD Secretary Scott Turner, who we wrote about in this newsletter last month, endorsed work requirements in his Senate confirmation hearing. “I think it’s good,” he said in response to a question about work requirements for housing. “I think we should encourage people to work.”

It is a simple, straightforward response. And it is what makes work requirements so deceptively dangerous.

Because very few people would disagree about the value of work. And a surface-level analysis of a work requirement’s impact does not raise alarm bells, either: virtually everyone who receives a housing subsidy now meets the requirements. They either already work in paid jobs or as a caregiver, or should be exempt from work requirements because of disability or age.

The devil is in the details.

Work requirements for social programs have a long and ugly history. They not only fail to encourage sustained employment, they end up punishing the children and persons living with disabilities who should be exempt from the requirements. The red-tape challenges of proving compliance with work requirements or disability exceptions has proven to push very vulnerable persons off the assistance they need to survive.

Image by Wannapik

We see the risks of this every week in eviction court. Our client Roger has significant leg and back injuries that put him in a wheelchair most of the time. Yet he is still waiting on a disability determination from the slow-moving Social Security Administration. Will he be blocked from housing assistance, too, just because his obvious inability to work is not yet certified?

What about our client Tina, whose work as a home health aide recently ended when her longtime patient passed away? Or Calvin, whose construction work is notoriously seasonal? Or Jasmine, who struggles to find someone besides herself to care for her child with significant disabilities? If they had to prove they are working today, they might not be able to do so.

No wonder that the research on work requirements for social programs shows they do not increase income in the affected households, and in fact usually plunge those households deeper into poverty.

Simply put, work requirements don’t work--unless your goal is to push people off of housing assistance. That may be Trump’s goal, but it is not ours. We need to resist work requirements at every turn.