Are some families too successful for affordable housing?
HUD has now published a final regulation (called, in terms reminiscent of monasteries , a ‘rule’) allowing local housing authorities (who own and operate ‘public housing’, the US equivalent of European ‘council housing’) to evict families who have become too successful to live there any more:
HUD may decide that such families should be able to find other housing and that public housing units should be made available for eligible low-income families with greater housing need.
Aware that evicting families who pay their rent may seem heartless, HUD hastily adds:
This final rule does not require PHAs to evict over-income residents, but rather gives PHAs the discretion to do so and thereby make units available for applicants who are income-eligible. [Emphasis added]
Yet everyone acknowledges that if you evict the higher income residents, adverse selection will lead to properties that house only the poorest of the poor, which is bad housing policy generally because, as one commenter noted:
Families with increasing incomes can also play a vital role in local strategies to create mixed-income communities and deconcentrate poverty in public housing. The presence of working families in public housing provides role models that contribute to a healthy, stable community . The presence of relatively higher-income families could help PHAs secure private funding for development purposes, helping both residents as well as the broader community.
Indeed, deconcentrating poverty is in fact a current policy objective:
the proposed rule works against deconcentration objectives…. Under the 1998 Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act (QHWRA), PHAs are required to plan for deconcentration, in order to promote a comparable mix of incomes in all developments,
and
by evicting over-income households, PHAs may be promoting higher concentrations of low income residents in some developments, thereby defeating the purposes of deconcentration.
Governments enact affordable housing programs for multiple reasons . Yet an affordable housing is a complex economic and social entity whose success is measured across multiple dimensions , and over long time intervals, usually necessitating
periodic intervention to keep the property sustainable.
Every design and operational decision involves a policy choice - protect the property or deliver affordability?
That question is not easily answered. In a country where only 1 in 4 income-eligible households receives housing assistance, is it ‘fair’ to evict those families who have succeeded, and give someone else a chance?
Is it wise for the property?
