Washington policy wizards have discovered a new federal housing outrage: twice as many households could be collecting Section 8 rental subsidies in the nation’s capital if the program was better managed.
Section 8 seeks to achieve “economic integration” and “income integration.” The DC government set the rental subsidy level for studio apartments at $3,652 per month and one-bedroom apartments at $3,768. Those subsidies are higher than 98 percent of all the one-bedroom and studio apartments rented in the city, according to an analysis by Capitol Commonsense website. That level of subsidy would enable recipients to rent almost everything except a penthouse apartment on the Georgetown waterfront.
The DC Housing Authority (DCHA) uses federal funds to pay up to $6,231 per month to rent four-bedroom apartments—four times the national median rent. A federal audit by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) found that DC subsidy levels violated federal law. But that condemnation didn’t slow the gravy train for lucky subsidized renters.
The DC government justifies the high rental subsidies to allow recipients to “move to opportunity.” But because recipients must pay up to a third of their income for rent under the program, collecting Section 8 sharply decreases work effort, according to numerous economic studies. If your reported income is zero, your rent is also zero—bummer! The average recipient stays on Section 8 for 15 years, so getting a rental voucher could be the equivalent of a million dollar windfall. Section 8 has a limited budget, meaning that not everyone eligible receives the subsidy. That has spawned endless bribery scandals going back decades.
According to the American Enterprise Institute, “The most direct drawback of DCHA’s unusually high payment standard is that it reduces the number of families who can receive housing assistance.”
Outrageous benefits have always been a feature, not a bug, of the Section 8 rental subsidy program created in 1974. In 1980, the US General Accounting Office concluded: “The high rents and quality of [Section 8] housing invite resentment on the part of the taxpaying public who see their subsidized neighbors living in better accommodations than they themselves can afford.” GAO also observed that Section 8’s goal of mixing the poor and the middle class is often not achieved because Section 8 “housing is often so costly that. . .even middle-income unassisted households cannot afford to live in it.”
Federal rental handouts reward irresponsibility and perennially bring out the worst in many recipients. In 1994, in a Wall Street Journal piece headlined “Clinton’s Wrecking Ball for Suburbs,” I warned, “Section 8 recipients can destroy neighborhoods because of the paralyzing red tape that HUD imposes on private landlords who want to evict deadbeat, hooligan and violent renters.” HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros denounced my piece and its “unfortunate stereotyping of assisted-housing residents.” Cisneros was a typical HUD boss who pretended that any collateral victims of HUD subsidies never existed.
HUD gives subsidized renters a right to raise hell. In 2009, HUD launched an investigation of the Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority for purportedly racially discriminatory Section 8 policies such as “eviction for offenses such as loud music.” But decibel levels are color-blind. In 2011, Cincinnati capitulated HUD’s demands and ceased penalizing Section 8 recipients for nuisance offenses.
A 2009 analysis on Section 8 published in Homicide Studies noted, “Crime, specifically homicide, became displaced to where the low-income residents were relocated. Homicide was simply moved to a new location, not eliminated.” After I wrote a 2011 Wall Street Journal piece detailing Section 8-spawned carnage, the ACLU denounced me, claiming that my article “viciously scapegoats families who receive housing subsidies.” But it wasn’t my fault that Section 8’s mischief multiplied after the Obama administration championed permitting ex-convicts (including murderers) to use Section 8.
Russell Vought—Trump’s Office of Management and Budget chief—derided Section 8 because it “brings with it crime, decreased property values, and results in dependency and subsidized irresponsibility.” At least 30 people were killed at Section 8 residences in Chicago during the first half of 2016. The Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago-based Better Government Association “matched the addresses of Section 8 housing in Chicago against the city’s online crime database” and found that, for the first six months of 2016, “police responded to reported crimes — from thefts to homicides — at 7,379 addresses where at least one voucher-holder lived.”
In Houston, male Section 8 recipients are twice as likely to commit violent crimes as people with similar backgrounds and incomes who did not receive housing vouchers. A Texas A&M University analysis attributed the “increase in arrests for violent crime” to “the additional funds and leisure time available to voucher recipients that can be used to commit crimes.” The analysis noted: “Moving to a better neighborhood. . .could increase crime by providing easier and wealthier targets.” A HUD-financed study found that Section 8 relocations had “tripled the rate of arrests for property crimes” among boys who moved to new locales.
Almost half of federal rental voucher recipients are black, but middle-class blacks are Section 8’s least-inhibited critics. Sheldon Carter of Antelope Valley, California, testified at a public hearing on local Section 8 controversies: “This is not a racial issue. It is a color issue. The color is green and it’s my dollars.” Shirlee Bolds told Iowa’s Dubuque Telegraph Herald in 2009: “I moved away from the city to get away from all this crap. Dubuque’s getting rough. I think it’s turning into a little Chicago, like they’re bringing the street rep here.” In southside Chicago, Keith Tate—the head of a local community association in a middle-class neighborhood—complained in 2011 that Section 8 “has been disastrous for Chatham. Never did we see individuals sitting on their cars drinking 40-ounce bottles of beer.”
But neither Section 8 recipients nor federal policymakers will ever be held liable. Despite OMB chief Vought’s condemnation, President Trump signed a housing bill early this year that boosted Section 8 subsidies by $4 billion. That bill got signed in the interlude between Trump’s victory over Venezuela and his victory over Iran, during a time when Trump was distracted by masterminding the new White House ballroom.
Trusting federal housing subsidies to produce social justice is the ultimate triumph of hope over experience.
