Choice and Progress: MTW Public Housing Authorities Expand Housing Options for Families

Common Barriers & Housing Authority Solutions to Boost Housing Choice

Barrier #1: Landlords, especially those in high opportunity neighborhoods, have many options to fill their units.

Housing vouchers uniquely enable low-income households to live in communities they may not otherwise be able to afford, offering them a chance to move out of higher-poverty and less-resourced neighborhoods if they so choose. Despite their importance to the success of the HV program, landlords have participated in fewer and fewer numbers in recent years, as HUD and others in the industry have documented.

Solution: Landlord incentives

MTW housing authorities draw on flexible funding to make voucher families more competitive applicants in their unique rental markets. For instance, in response to a limited supply of available one-bedroom units in the Louisville area, LMHA offers a special incentive to landlords who lease this housing type to their voucher holders. To test and evaluate landlord incentives, HUD selected 29 PHAs to join the MTW program as a cohort focused on these strategies. While it is too early to report on any findings from the cohort, the PHAs highlighted below were able to report increases in housing choice because of their landlord incentives.

Barrier #2: The inspection process lengthens lease-up timelines, and owners incur the costs of repairs.

More than half of landlords surveyed in HUD’s landlord participation study cited inspection issues as motivation for not participating in the HCV program. The process of scheduling an inspection can take days or even weeks, and failed inspections add more days to the lease-up timeline. Last year, HUD completed a comprehensive overhaul of its inspection protocol, and the resulting National Standards for the Inspection of Real Estate rule replaced Housing Quality Standards as the framework to determine housing quality. One of HUD’s goals for the overhaul was to address landlord concerns about the consistency of inspections, but challenges remain.

Solution: Flexible inspection timing and incentives for compliance

MTW PHAs have developed their own strategies in response to critiques about the inspection process, with the aim to boost landlord participation and thus housing choice. Some PHAs have developed new processes to offer pre-qualifying inspections to landlords as soon as their units are ready for inspection, rather than waiting for applicants to submit inspection requests. San Diego Housing Commission shared that the pre-inspection program was a compelling method to engage landlords who had concerns about timelines to lease up HCV clients versus market rate clients.

Barrier #3: Landlords fear HCV tenants will damage their units.

Landlords who choose not to lease to HCV families often do so for financial reasons. Some have misconceptions that households who receive vouchers will damage units, and that those households will be unable to pay for the costs of repairs.

Solution: Funds to pay for damage expenses

To alleviate landlord concerns, MTW housing authorities have set aside funds to cover certain tenant-caused damages to units they lease. Typically, the damages must be incurred within a certain period during an HCV family’s tenancy, be documented and reported by the landlord in a timely manner, and be in excess of normal wear and tear.

Barrier #4: HCV families may not be able to afford monthly rents for units in resource-rich areas.

HUD typically sets one fair market rent (FMR) amount per metropolitan area, which means rental units that are affordable to HCV families are often clustered in lower-rent neighborhoods of that metro area. PHAs do have the discretion to vary the payment standard between 90% and 110% of their area’s FMR, giving them the ability to account for varying local market conditions, but voucher families may still have difficulty finding affordable units in higher-cost and higher opportunity neighborhoods.

Solution: Higher rent payments

In October 2023, HUD expanded the use of neighborhood-level rents to 41 public housing authorities in an attempt to boost families’ ability to afford units in a wider array of neighborhoods. Moving to Work PHAs have employed similar strategies to enable their voucher holders to access units in desirable neighborhoods. Atlanta Housing Authority staff shared that, while Atlanta is still a challenging market, sub-market payment standards have been an important tool to open up higher-quality housing opportunities for their families.

Conclusion

The Housing Choice Voucher program offers a critical boost to low-income households at a time when our nation’s housing supply is inadequate to meet demand, and many households struggle to find available, affordable homes. Higher, more competitive rents, monetary incentives, and tackling inspections earlier in the process allows Moving to Work housing authorities to help their voucher holders find and secure housing in competitive markets. Congress should consider raising or removing the cap on the number of housing authorities that can participate in the MTW program, enabling more local jurisdictions to expand housing choice for families in their communities.