A Section 8 rant

I went in search of Radley Balko’s testimony in the Internet gambling hearings on Capitol Hill. Because of a doctor’s appointment, I got in too late to watch. I found something interesting though. The House Committee on Financial Services passed H.R. 1851. From the press release dated May 25th:

Washington, DC – The House Financial Services Committee today passed H.R. 1851, the Section 8 Voucher Reform Act of 2007. The bill passed by a wide bipartisan margin of 52 to 9. The legislation would reform the Section 8 funding formula to make it more efficient, revise the rent calculation process for Section 8 and public housing to expand work incentives and reduce administrative costs, increase flexibility to use vouchers for homeownership, amend voucher targeting rules to increase voucher opportunities for lower income working families in rural areas, and authorize an expansion in the number of families receiving vouchers by 20,000 a year for each of the next five years. [snip]

The full committee also voted today to adopt Rep. Waters’ Manager’s Amendment that would provide for the following provisions:

Using Vouchers for the Purchase of manufactured homes
Permits vouchers to be used for the full cost of purchasing manufactured homes on leased land

Protecting Vouchers Reserved for Persons with Disabilities
Requires HUD to issue guidance to ensure that the 50,000+ vouchers created for persons with disabilities continue be reserved for such persons.

Breaking the Cap on the number of families a housing authority can serve
Permits housing agencies to exceed their limit on the number of voucher holders they can serve, thus encouraging more efficient use of voucher funds

Voucher Reserves
Increases from 2% to 5% the percentage of reserves housing agencies can retain for the voucher program

Portability
Provides for full funding for the cost of housing agencies accepting voucher holders from other communities, to strengthen the voucher program’s feature that lets families move from one community to another.

Family Self Sufficiency Coordinators
Provides for a more reliable funding source for the cost of family self-sufficiency coordinators that assist public housing residents in finding employment.

More Accurate Market Rent and Funding Adjustments
Requires HUD to establish smaller areas for the purpose of calculating Fair Market Rent levels and providing annual voucher funding inflation adjustments, in order to improve the accuracy of such calculations

Housing Innovation Program
Expands the number of public housing agencies that can participate in the Housing Innovation Program [renamed from “Moving to Work”], which lets agencies experiment with development, financing, and work incentive proposals, while also adding substantial tenant protections to the program

Subsequently, the Committee passed a number of amendments, as follows:

A Waters amendment to expand the permissible number of Housing Innovation Program agencies by 20, plus a second category of 20 additional agencies under expanded tenant protections, including expanded resident participation in any proposals to demolish public housing units
A Green amendment, modified by an amendment by Rep. Bachus, to authorize 20,000 new incremental vouchers in each of the next five years
A Waters amendment to strengthen protections for voucher families in units that fail to meet federal housing quality standards
A Lynch/Murphy amendment to strengthen voucher provisions to address areas when families face high rent burdens
A Watt amendment to ensure that families seeking public and assisted housing are only screened based on their ability to meet lease obligations
A Murphy amendment to exclude income from Coverdell and Section 529 educational accounts from rent calculations
A Moore [WI] amendment to increase voucher work incentives for severely disabled persons, in conjunction with State demonstration programs
A Capuano/Lynch amendment to protect families making less than 95% of median income from being evicted from “Demo Dispo” and Section 8 limited equity cooperative developments
A Green amendment to authorize 15 year contract terms for vouchers used in housing tax credit projects, to help facilitate financing for such projects
A Capuano amendment to protect “empty nesters” from eviction from certain buildings when their units are oversized

I’ve never claimed to be the brightest star in the constellation, so bear with me as I try to work some of this out. There are many points of this that I disagree with, but some glaring problems:

As a Section 8 recipient, you can have property bought for you by the taxpayer, you can save for your child’s education in a 529 and have the account excluded from rent calculations, and you can move onto a property with no screening outside of the ability to pay the rent. To facilitate these things, we are going to expand a government agency.

How did the middle class taxpayer get the privilege of footing the bill? What makes anybody think this bullshit acceptable? What makes a Section 8 recipient’s 529 savings special enough to not be considered savings? (If you are saving, shouldn’t you be able to pay for housing?) And before some smartass pipes in with “it’s really such a small part of government spending,” let me just say that pennies make dollars. It is immoral for the government to take my pennies so they can make dollars for someone else.

Non-recipients have to save for, qualify with a lender, purchase our own housing and pay taxes on it. We have to budget carefully so that we can save for our children’s education and meet our housing obligations. And, if we were renters, we would be subject to screening based on credit, employment, and criminal history.

When I was living as a single parent without the benefit of child support, my girls and I lived in what we could afford. For one particularly rough year (1999), the three of us shared a one bedroom apartment. It was not easy, but the rent was cheap enough for me to get back on my feet after a car accident nearly wrecked our lives. I had just returned to working after some time off nursing the kiddos back to health and I was making $10 an hour in a temporary position. Applying for a government handout never crossed my mind. I guess my sense of fair play is too deep seated to ask somebody I don’t know to sacrifice their life for mine.

When people wonder why I’m a libertarian and why I think that libertarian policy would work, I have only to reflect on my life. I’m not special and I’m not from a wealthy family. I did work my ass off, make a couple of sacrifices and things got better.

~ by Miche on June 8, 2007.