Tag Archives: Section 8

Surprise! Some rents going down

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Burlington’s chronic housing-affordability problem is bad enough — more than a third of the city’s 9,500 renting households are paying more than half their income for rent and utilities, which puts them in the “severely burdened” category — but guess what? It’s getting arguably worse. burlingtonapt

HUD just came out with its 2016 fair market rents for the Burlington/South Burlington metro area, and they’re lower than they were for 2015. This despite the fact that actual rents in this area have been going up every year. (The 2016 numbers are up and down across the state, as Vermont Housing Finance Agency’s news blog helpfully details.)

If you really want to know why Burlington’s numbers went down, you can go to the HUD page to see the methodology. The unfortunate upshot, though, is that anyone with a Section 8 housing voucher is going to have less to choose from in 2016 than they do this year. That’s because apartments that cost more than the “fair market rent” are off-limits for subsidy. (If it makes you feel any better, remember that majority of Burlington’s “burdened” households don’t have vouchers anyway. Nationally HUD rental assistance extends to only about one-fourth of the people who are income-eligible.)

OK, let’s consider a two-bedroom apartment. The 2016 “fair market rent” is $1,172 (as compared to 2015’s $1,302). What are the offerings on Craigslist?

Here are the first 10 listed rents for two-bedroom apartments in Burlington and environs (South Burlington, Colchester) that we found at noon Monday. (Craigslist is constantly updated, so if you do the search the results will vary):

$2,500, $1,600, $2,500, $2,100, $1,425, $2,400, $2,025, $2,000, $2,000, $1,650.

How “fair” is that market? Now, perhaps Craiglist rents tend to be above average (are there studies that document this?), but there’s not much consolation in that, especially if you have a housing-choice voucher.

More housing-crisis dispatches

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Another of our occasional samplers on the unaffordability epidemic:

  • As Seattle wrestles with housing unaffordability, an op-ed in the local paper recommends looking to Berlin!

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Germany’s largest city, newly flooded by young people and immigrants, has a population of 85 percent renters and has introduced a new form of rent control — the “rental price brake,” which seeks to rein in rent increases. (Median rents have gone up 50 percent in six years, by one account.) And government has imposed other constraints – on renovations (can’t be too fancy without approval) and on conversion to vacation homes. Well, that may sound promising, but to what effect? Protesters are in the streets, we learn in the Wall Street Journal, as “Berlin’s Housing Problems Boil Over.”

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  • In Edina, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis, 96 percent of the housing stock is unaffordable to a family of four earning $43,000 annually. So, the City Council is considering a form of inclusionary zoning with a buy-out provision. New developments would have to include 10 percent affordable units, or that requirement could be waived if the developer pays $220,000 per unit into a city fund to support affordable housing. Now, that’s not a new idea, but the buy-out figure looks rather high (Burlington’s is $100,000 per unit), and of course, there’s the concern that any new housing developed by the city not lump all the lower-income people together in their own blighted enclave.
  • In Columbus, Ohio’s Franklin County, more than 24,000 people applied for Section 8 vouchers from an agency that is prepared to give out … 200, followed by 70 a month. That’s in a county where 13,000 vouchers are in use.
  • In Miami, old people camped out overnight just so they could file applications to live in an affordable senior housing complex.
  • In Portland, Ore., the newly declared “housing emergency” is expected to last at least a year.
  • And in Palo Alto – we know, we know, this is Silicon Valley and expected to be unaffordable beyond  imagining – a local man and college graduate who earns a “decent salary” is living with his parents because he can’t afford an apartment. He graduated from Palo Alto High 20 years ago, so he’s too old to be a Millennial! Here’s what he told the City Council about himself and his cohorts:

“All of us went to great colleges, great grad schools, and not one of us can live in the city.”

 

Where can Section 8 families live?

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We’ve mentioned in several posts that low-income families benefit in various ways when they’re able to live in mixed-income, “high opportunity” neighborhoods. (And we contend that these inclusive neighborhoods benefit, too, in various ways – economically, socially and culturally.)

Here are two publications that document the benefits to low-income children. “The Effects of Exposure to Better Neighborhoods on Children,” which came out in May, found that children in poor families move to better neighborhoods before the age of 13, they wind up with higher educational attainment and higher salaries as adults.

Another paper, “Children and Housing Vouchers,” argued that public policy should promote locating families with housing choice vouchers under the Section 8 program — families who live predominantly in lower-income areas, nationally — in better neighborhoods. (Baltimore’s Housing Mobility Program was cited as an example with documented benefits.) This paper noted that HUD’s Section 8 program, in which voucher-holders rent from private landlords, is in a better position to spread voucher-holders among low-poverty areas than HUD’s project-based public housing program.

All of this got us thinking about housing choice vouchers in Vermont. According to Vermont’s 2015 Housing Needs Assessment, there are about 6,310 housing choice vouchers in this state, and about 3,100 households on the waiting list. To these numbers, add these, from the 2012 Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice: 23 of Vermont’s 184 census tracts had concentrations of low-to-moderate income people, as shown on this map:

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So, here are our questions of the day, awaiting further research:

  • How many of these voucher holders live in the low-income zones, and how many live elsewhere? (Perhaps HUD’s new data analysis tools supplied under the AFFH rule will help answer this.)
  • What are policy-makers or housing officials doing, if anything, to encourage Section 8 voucher holders to move to low-poverty, high-opportunity neighborhoods?

Granted, HUD’s subsidizable “fair market rents” may rule out units in some properties, particularly, one- or two-unit “non-conventional” housing that according to the Needs Assessment tends to be pricier in Vermont. Still, HUD’s Fair Market Rents for Chittenden County, according to the assessment, seem high enough to allow voucher holders a good deal of choice. They range from $1,003 for a one-bedroom apartment to $1,925 for 4 bedrooms.

 

Ferguson and beyond

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The Times had a story over the weekend on housing segregation in St. Louis region, including Ferguson. Focus was on African American holders of Section 8 vouchers who found themselves limited in where they could move. St. Louis County, it seems, does not have protection for them.

We note here that programs that have sent minority voucher holders to low-poverty areas, in suburban Chicago and Baltimore, for example, have brought benefits in education and employment. We also note that in Vermont, receipt of public assistance is a protected class, so refusing to rent to a Section 8 voucher holder is illegal.