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As the president and Congress slug it out over spending during the annual federal budget process, funding for low-income rental voucher holders hangs in the balance.
President Trump’s budget would slash $32.9 billion in funding to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, including some $26.7 billion would be cut from federal rental aid. The proposed cuts outlined in the so-called “skinny budget” submitted in early May comprise about 40 percent of all such aid, and would essentially end Section 8 and other housing voucher programs.
Boston housing officials warned landlords in a mid-May letter to brace for possible cuts to Section 8. Since then, local housing authorities and Massachusetts representatives have agitated against the proposed cuts.
This week on The Codcast, Kenzie Bok, head of the Boston Housing Authority, joins CommonWealth Beacon reporter Jennifer Smith to discuss the threat of President Trump’s budget on rental assistance spending.
The housing authority administers about 20,000 vouchers, some 18,000 of which are supported by the federal government with money that the housing authority passes through to landlords. The average BHA family makes around $20,000 a year, Bok said, including elders, people with disabilities, and families with multiple children on limited income.
Just under $450 million a year comes from the federal government to be passed on month-by-month to the BHA’s landlords, which number at more than 6,000.
That budget “triggered a lot of our concern,” Bok said, even before Trump fleshed out his budget asks in a sprawling appendix sent to lawmakers on Friday. The across-the-board cast would mean terminating about 8,000 of the BHA’s Section 8 vouchers, Bok said.
“That would be about 11,000 kids that we would be making homeless again,” Bok said. “And I say again because we almost exclusively house people out of homelessness into our voucher portfolio. So these are families who we’ve already taken from housing instability to stability, and the risk of making them unstable again is so great and so unacceptable – for our region but also the whole country.”
While President Trump’s budget is a useful guide to the executive office priorities, Congress typically hashes out its own budget priorities as leadership scrambles to keep party coalitions in line. Bok said she hopes that that Congress will choose not to go along with the level of HUD slashing that Trump proposed.
“Forewarned is forearmed, but we think preparing for the worst and hoping for the best means acting, and the coalition of folks, who know how successful the Section 8 program has been, are able to make their voices heard while there is still time to avoid deep cuts.”
Bok discusses the funding models for public housing (2:30), preparing and rallying landlords (8:30), and how realistic it would be for the state to pick up the slack (17:00). |
