This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
The Burlington Housing Authority has suspended rental vouchers for about 70 low-income households currently searching for housing, according to its executive director, Steven Murray.
That means people who had finally secured a voucher — sometimes after months of waiting — but have not yet found a place to live have lost the subsidy that could help them afford an apartment. Others still on the waitlist, meanwhile, will have little chance of getting off of it this year.
The move earlier this week is one of several cost-cutting measures the housing authority has begun to take as it anticipates a budget cut from the federal government this year. As homelessness in the Queen City — and across Vermont — worsens, many fear that the actions could hinder efforts to move people experiencing homelessness into stable housing.
“The brutal reality is, we have to get within our spending authority,” Murray said in a Thursday interview. “There’s no winged unicorn coming out of D.C. or Montpelier that’s going to come and give us this shortfall money.”
Federal housing choice vouchers, often referred to as Section 8, are a key tool to sustain housing for low-income people who can’t afford market-rate rents. Individuals and families with vouchers pay a third of their income toward rent; a local agency administering the federal program pays for the rest. The Burlington Housing Authority is the second-largest of the nine housing authorities in Vermont, overseeing about 2,400 vouchers, according to Murray. Only the statewide housing authority is larger.
Jess Horner, program director at John Graham Housing and Services in Addison County, had been trying to find housing for a family of six with a BHA voucher. The family had fled a previous living situation because of domestic violence, according to Horner, and had been living at the organization’s Vergennes shelter for several months while trying to find somewhere to use their existing voucher in the Burlington area. They had struggled to find an apartment large enough at an affordable rate.
When a shelter employee contacted the housing authority about receiving an extension for the voucher this week, Stephanie Bixby, its director of rental assistance, wrote back that the organization was not offering extensions. “Due to funding constraints, we are suspending all issued vouchers effective immediately,” she wrote in an email.
Horner went to inform the family that they had just lost their best ticket out of the shelter.
“They are crying, they won’t come out of the room. The kids didn’t go to school today,” Horner said on Thursday. “They feel totally hopeless.”
How the decision was made
In early December, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sent a letter to local housing authority directors signaling a projected funding cut, based on draft bills in Congress.
“There is a great deal of uncertainty about when Congress will” complete a final budget bill, according to a version of the HUD letter shared with VTDigger/Vermont Public by Kathleen Berk, director of the Vermont State Housing Authority. But funding for housing choice vouchers this year “is likely to be very tight,” the letter reads.
Burlington Housing Authority quickly began determining how to prepare for a 2.5% reduction, which the letter indicated was the best-case scenario. The voucher program would be left with a $1.6 million shortfall, even if the organization drains its funding reserves, which it plans to do, Murray said.
“We had to start by pulling those 70 vouchers off the street,” Murray said, referring to vouchers held by people currently searching for an apartment where they can use the subsidy. Letters went out to those people on Wednesday, Murray said. People will return to their prior spot on the waitlist, he added.
The housing authority will begin taking other measures to try to live within its projected shrunken budget. According to a letter it sent to “community partners” this week, it will also stop issuing new vouchers to people coming off of its waiting list.
“Chances are, you’re not getting a voucher this year unless Congress funds us at 100%,” Murray said.
Burlington Housing Authority will also stop an existing process that allows Murray, as director, to permit an individual or family to bypass the waitlist because of a disability or an emergency like domestic violence, Murray said. It will also cease providing vouchers to people who are currently housed but are at risk of losing their housing because of an extenuating circumstance, like a relative fell ill and they could no longer afford rent, Murray said.
Beyond simply not signing new leases, the housing authority would also need to speed up its regular rate of attrition to comply with the projected budget cut, according to Murray. Normally, about 11 households leave the program in a given month, for reasons such as death or increased income that makes them ineligible, Murray said. He projected that the housing authority will need to up that rate to 17 a month. To do that, it won’t provide current voucher holders with “second chances” as readily as it has, he said. If a tenant breaks a program rule, for example, the organization plans to act more quickly to rescind their subsidy.
“There’s no way of sugarcoating this,” Murray said. “But we would rather augment our normal attrition with people that can’t follow the rules, than to be put in a position where we’re randomly picking families that might have to lose their voucher.”
Housing authorities seek to ‘minimize the impact’
Not all housing authorities in Vermont are taking immediate action in the wake of the federal housing department’s projections. The Vermont State Housing Authority is waiting to see where federal appropriations land over the course of the next few months, according to Berk, the director.
If a shortfall does come, the state housing authority would likely shelve vouchers for people leaving the program, and not reissue them to people on their lengthy waiting list, Berk said. It may also consider pulling vouchers that have been issued to people currently searching for housing, she added. It does plan to close its waitlist at the end of this month, Berk said. That is largely because of long wait times, but the projected funding cut “led us to that decision faster,” she said.
Berk, however, was disheartened by the Burlington Housing Authority’s sudden changes.
“I was disappointed that BHA went ahead and publicly noticed this without first collaborating with other housing authority partners,” Berk said in a Friday interview. The public housing authority directors from around the state plan to meet early next week, she added, and she hopes they can find a way to work together to “minimize the impact on Vermonters.” That could look like one housing authority absorbing families from another to assure they don’t lose assistance, she said.
If the housing authorities aren’t able to pull off such a task, people who might lose their voucher risk falling into homelessness, further straining a response system already stretched well beyond its limits.
“If the end result is that households who are housed are going to lose their rental assistance, I fear that we’ll see a huge impact on our homeless system — after already knowing that we have upwards of 300 people who are unsheltered in Chittenden County,” said Sarah Russell, Burlington’s special assistant to end homelessness.
Still, Berk and Murray both advised against panic.
“Even with this funding, the huge majority of our current voucher holders have no worries,” Murray said.
Both housing authority directors indicated they may seek assistance from state officials to try to bridge the potential federal funding shortfall — an ask they understand could be a long shot, given budget constraints in Montpelier.
“We all join this business to help people, and this is really a gut blow to us,” Murray said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Low-income households lose rental vouchers as Burlington Housing Authority anticipates funding cuts.