Additional Housing Vouchers Needed to Stem Increase in Homelessness
End Notes
[1] “Housing Vouchers Are Critical for Ending Family Homelessness,” Research Matters, January 2008 (Homelessness Research Institute).
[2] Sharon Parrott, “Recession Could Cause Large Increases in Poverty and Push Millions into Deep Poverty,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, November 24, 2008; https://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1290.
[3] The 2008 poverty line for a family of four in the continental United States is $21,200. HUD publishes annual estimates of the median (50th percentile) and 40th percentile “gross rent” (rent and utilities) of recently rented non-luxury dwellings for each metropolitan area and non-metropolitan county. For most metropolitan areas and all non-metropolitan counties, HUD sets the “Fair Market Rent” (FMR) at the 40th percentile of the rent charged for recently rented non-luxury dwellings; for 28 metropolitan areas where voucher holders have tended to concentrate in a small portion of the area’s census tracts, HUD sets the FMR at the 50th percentile to give voucher holders a larger choice of units. The $900 average rent figure was calculated by the National Low Income Housing Coalition using HUD’s FMR estimates for 2008, weighted by the number of renter households in each county in 2000. Keith E. Wardrip, Danilo Pelletiere, and Sheila Crowley, “Out of Reach 2007-2008,” National Low Income Housing Coalition, April 2008.
[4] Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Underemployed” people refers to people who are working part time involuntarily, i.e., for economic reasons.
[5] Food stamp participation data are from FNS program data for January 2009, available at http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/29SNAPcurrPP.htm. On the historical relationship between food stamp enrollment and poverty, see “Policy Basics: Introduction to the Food Stamp Program,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, April 3, 2009; available at https://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2226.
[6] Petula Dvorak, “In D.C., Number of Families Without Housing Jumps,” Washington Post, March 19, 2009. For a survey of recent reports from across the country, see Wendy Koch, “Homelessness up as families on the edge lose hold,” USA Today, April 6, 2009. The National Alliance to End Homelessness is also tracking reports from communities that have just completed the HUD-mandated annual homelessness census; these are available at: http://www.endhomelessness.org/section/news/press/2009countsmap.
[7] Barbara Duffield and Phillip Lovell, “The Economic Crisis Hits Home: The Unfolding Crisis in Child & Youth Homelessness,” First Focus and the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth, December 2008; http://www.naehcy.org/dl/TheEconomicCrisisHitsHome.pdf. See also Abt Associates, “U.S. Conference of Mayors 2008 Status Report on Hunger and Homelessness,” December 2008, http://www.usmayors.org/pressreleases/documents/hungerhomelessnessreport_121208.pdf.
[8] HUD, The Third Annual Homeless Assessment and Report to Congress, July 2008. Data collected by public schools and reported to the U.S. Department of Education suggest that three times as many children are living “doubled up” with other families, in hotels/motels, or on the street, as are living in emergency shelters or transitional housing. See National Center for Homeless Education, “Education for Homeless Children and Youth Program: Analysis of Data,” July 2008.
[9] Jeffrey Lubell and Maya Brennan, ““Framing the Issues — the Positive Impacts of Affordable Housing on Education” and Jeffrey Lubell, Rosalyn Crain, and Rebecca Cohen, “Framing the Issues — the Positive Impacts of Affordable Housing on Health,” Center for Housing Policy and Enterprise Community Partners, 2007. See also The National Center on Family Homelessness, America’s Youngest Outcasts, 2008.
[10] On the general effectiveness of housing vouchers, see: U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO), Federal Housing Assistance: Comparing the Characteristics and Costs of Housing Programs, GAO-02-76, 2002; Bipartisan Millennial Housing Commission, Meeting Our Nation’s Housing Challenges, 2002; and U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Congressional Budget Justifications for FY 2009.” For a brief review of research on the effectiveness of vouchers in reducing family homelessness, see the article by Jill Khadduri cited in note 1.
[11] However, for any production subsidy to succeed in creating or rehabilitating housing that is affordable for the low-income families most at risk of homelessness, rental assistance must usually be layered on top of the production subsidy.
[12] Under the National Housing Trust Fund, 90 percent of funds must be used for the preservation or production of rental housing, and 75 percent of the resulting rental housing must benefit families with extremely low incomes (i.e., below 30 percent of the area median income, which is roughly equivalent to the federal poverty line). Most other federal production programs are targeted to households with significantly higher incomes.
[13] Housing cost data are from the American Housing Survey for 2003 and 2007. The only other period during which Congress has failed to fund a significant number of new housing vouchers each year was 1995 to 1998. In 2008 and 2009, Congress funded a modest number of new housing vouchers, about 30,000 in total. (This excludes so-called “tenant protection” vouchers, which are provided to households forced to leave their existing federally supported housing, for such reasons as that the public housing project in which they reside is being demolished.)
[14] The actual number of households assisted under HPRP could be significantly higher or lower, depending on the types of assistance that local agencies choose to provide. The figures cited here assume that about one third of the funding is used for short or intermediate term rental assistance, one third for financial assistance such as security deposits, and one third for other services and administration.
[15] HUD Office of Public and Indian Housing, Seventh Annual Report to Congress on Public Housing and Rental Assistance Programs: Demographics, Income and Work and Rent, 2008. HUD reports that between 2003 and 2006, an average of 11.2 percent of voucher recipients exited the program each year. The lowest turnover rate was 8.8 percent (2003) and the highest was 13.8 percent (2006).