March 9,
2007
TESTIMONY OF BARBARA SARD
DIRECTOR OF HOUSING POLICY, CENTER ON BUDGET AND POLICY PRIORITIES
Before the House Financial Services Subcommittee
on Housing and Community Opportunity
I appreciate the opportunity to testify
concerning the proposed Section 8 Voucher Reform Act. I am Barbara Sard,
director of housing policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The
Center is an independent, nonprofit policy institute that conducts research and
analysis on a range of federal and state policy issues, with particular emphasis
on fiscal policies and policies affecting low- and moderate-income families. The
housing work of the Center focuses primarily on the housing voucher program. We
receive no government grants or contracts and are funded by foundations and
individual donors.
Overview The Section 8 voucher program is the
nation’s largest low-income housing program. It has proven effective in reducing
homelessness and severe housing costs burdens, and improving housing and
neighborhood quality and family well-being. As with any government program, the
voucher program needs to evolve over time, as circumstances change and lessons
are learned. Nine years have passed since the 1998 enactment of the Quality
Housing and Work Responsibility Act (QHWRA), the last major authorizing
legislation affecting the voucher program. The Section 8 Voucher Reform Act (SEVRA)
represents a timely, balanced, carefully-crafted effort to improve certain
aspects of the voucher program, while at the same time leaving in place the core
characteristics that have underpinned the program’s success.
SEVRA’s most important provisions would
establish a fair, efficient and comprehensive funding formula to make permanent
the reform begun by the fiscal year 2007 appropriations resolution. Largely as a
result of flawed funding formulas that HUD and Congressional appropriations
committees put in place from 2004 to 2006, the number of families receiving
voucher assistance has declined by about 150,000 since early 2004. The SEVRA
funding formula would bring badly needed stability to the program, allowing and
encouraging agencies to serve additional families and meet other key program
goals while maintaining incentives to contain cost growth.
In addition, SEVRA would streamline and
strengthen program rules in several key areas --including voucher housing
quality inspections, targeting of vouchers on extremely low-income families, and
rules for determining tenant rents in the voucher program, public housing, and
privately owned assisted housing – while maintaining vital tenant protections.
We understand that the version of SEVRA to be
introduced shortly will omit a section from the version of SEVRA considered in
the last Congress (H.R. 5443) which would have expanded the “Moving to Work”
demonstration without assurance of meaningful evaluation or adequate
opportunities for the families served by the voucher and public housing programs
to participate in the development of new local policies. We opposed this
provision, and are pleased that the committee has reconsidered its inclusion.
Any extension or expansion of MTW should be limited in scope, and carefully
designed to ensure that tenants retain fundamental protections of federal
housing law and have real opportunities to participate in policy development,
and that the demonstration produces real research findings that can be applied
broadly to improve the low-income housing programs of the future.
We also would like to draw the committee’s attention
to several potential improvements to the voucher program that are not included
in the discussion draft.
- Simplifying the process used to administer
“portability” of vouchers from the jurisdiction of one agency to the
jurisdiction of another;
- Ensuring that caps on the rents vouchers can
cover, or “payment standards,” are adequate to prevent unreasonable rent
burdens for poor families and enable families to live outside areas of
concentrated poverty;
- Making it easier for housing agencies to
use the “project-based voucher” option to promote a range of housing
goals;
- Allowing greater use of vouchers in
mobile homes; and
- Improving the performance measurement
requirement in SEVRA by adding agency performance measures relating to
deconcentration of poverty and other important social objectives.
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