It takes 130 days to use a Chicago Housing Authority voucher
If you’re lucky.
A reminder that, we’ll be hosting another meetup for A City That Works readers on July 17th, at Jefferson Tap from 5:30-8:30pm. Hope to see you there!
In May, WBEZ published a good article about landlords discriminating against recipients of Housing Choice Vouchers. Landlords will go to great extents to reject these applicants (which is illegal in Illinois). Many applicants mused that there was a component of racial discrimination in the works. I’d bet they’re right. But, like many things around here, the underlying dynamics reflect a mix of causes – including race, sluggish public sector processes, and our broader housing shortage.
What is the housing choice voucher program?
The Housing Choice Voucher program (HCVs), colloquially known as Section 8, is the largest source of rental assistance in the country. In 2023, those vouchers supported 42,866 families in Chicago, or one in every 28 Chicago residents.1 HCVs supported another 10,142 families in suburban Cook County via the Housing Authority of Cook County. Tenants pay 30% of their income in rent to their landlord, and the voucher pays the balance of the rent up to a set cap. In Chicago, the average voucher is worth $1,215 per month, according to HUD.
Voucher holders are generally very low income. CHA reports that 89% of voucher holders (heads of household) are Black, and 83% of them are women. Think of the representative family with a voucher as a single mom with two kids, who works at least part-time and makes a little over $16,000 a year.2
The process for receiving and using these vouchers is deeply broken. In part, that’s because there aren’t enough to go around. Nationally, there are about four times as many families who would qualify for an HCV as there are vouchers. The CHA waitlist to get a voucher is closed – which means families *can’t even apply*. The last time the waitlist opened was in 2014, when 75,000 families were added before it closed again.
But there’s a big difference between getting a voucher and getting a place to live. Families that are lucky enough to receive a voucher still have to find a landlord in the private market willing to rent to them. That’s always been difficult, but it’s gotten harder since 2020. In 2022, only 58% of the households with a voucher searching for a place to rent in Suburban Cook County were successful.
And even when families are successful, they’re searching for far longer than they have before. In 2022, Chicago and Cook County voucher holders spent an average of almost 130 days looking before they found a place to live.
While there are some reasons that I’d avoid comparing the CHA’s figures directly to the overall median for high rent counties,3 it’s a reasonable comparison for HACC. And you’ll notice that HACC is doing pretty poorly – applicants have lower success rates and higher search times than they do in other high-rent parts of the country.4
When the Tribune asked the CHA about these numbers, the CHA’s response is that they still utilize the full funding amount they get from HUD. By issuing more vouchers than they actually have funds for, the CHA effectively budgets for families to spend over a hundred days searching and still pays as many rent checks as possible.
If you hold as fixed everything else about this process, I’m glad that the CHA is still supporting as many families as possible. But this is still a terrible way to run a voucher program.
It’s exhausting and degrading: Using a voucher shouldn’t require an all-consuming search over months with only a coin flip’s chance of success. We shouldn’t inflict that process on anyone – least of all single moms in deep poverty.
It’s expensive: Longer search times and more rejected applications mean agencies have to spend more time in compliance and monitoring. And landlords who know tenants and housing authorities have fewer alternative options may be able to charge higher rents to voucher holders than they would otherwise.
It likely weakens the program as a whole: Even though vouchers are still an extremely important (and cost effective) tool for stabilizing families, the dysfunctional process associated with using them makes it a lot harder to argue that public housing authorities are well run or could handle an expansion of the program. Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias is right to point out that to build trust in government, we need to make government do a better job delivering for residents. This is how we should approach the DMV, and it’s how we should approach the CHA as well.
So what’s driving these delays? And how can we fix them?
Landlords dislike Housing Choice Voucher applicants
As the WBEZ story noted, it’s certainly true that some landlords have negative perceptions of Housing Choice Voucher participants. There are a bunch of reasons why this is the case. You don’t have to spend long on landlord forums to find negative stereotypes about Housing Choice Voucher holders, and suspicion that voucher holders will be less likely to maintain their properties than market rate tenants.
But tenant stereotypes aren’t the only reason landlords don’t like to take HCVs. When a landlord agrees to accept a voucher holder’s application, they are suddenly subject to a range of rules that don’t apply in the private market. In Chicago, the CHA conducts a background check on the landlord, inspects the unit to determine if it is up to CHA standards, and can negotiate with the landlord over the rent that had already been advertised and accepted by the tenant.
There are reasons that these rules exist: just imagine the headlines if the CHA was found writing checks to a felon, paying for tenants to live in substandard housing, or overpaying for market rents. But any of them can also derail the leasing process. The landlord can fail the background check, the unit can fail the inspection, or the CHA can decide that the rent agreed to between the landlord and tenant is too high.
Slow approval timelines mean that landlords have to keep units open for weeks longer than would be required for a market rate tenant, leaving rent on the table. Inspections can be arbitrary, resulting in a property getting dinged even after a tenant has applied. And because PHA’s make the final determination on what counts as acceptable rent, a property can be dinged at the end of the process, even if the landlord and tenant agree on a rent that’s below the areas HUD-defined fair market rents.
In fact, one study found that 68% of landlords who refused to accept HCVs had actually participated in the program previously. They stopped accepting vouchers because they had a negative experience with the administrative requirements or felt that the PHA unreasonably took the side of a tenant when a landlord-tenant dispute cropped up.
To be clear, Illinois law doesn’t care whether a landlord’s concerns are sympathetic or not. We have (rightfully, I believe), decided that if you want to rent property, you can reject a tenant based on their credit score or past rental history, but you can’t reject them simply because they’re paying with a voucher.5
But attempting to fix this problem without also addressing the underlying reasons why they avoid vouchers is unlikely to result in structural change. And the slower the process is, the easier it is to discriminate against a voucher holder without getting caught. It’s illegal to deny a unit to a tenant based on their source of income, but it’s not illegal to rent that unit to a non-voucher holder while waiting for the Public Housing Authority to process their paperwork or send out an inspector. And that’s exactly what the forums suggest: accept the HCV application with a smile, and then simply rent to a market-rate tenant before the paperwork comes back.
Lengthy approval processes make this problem worse
Many of the paperwork and hang-ups associated with the HCV program are the result of national requirements. There’s a rich literature base on potential solutions at the federal level – there are plenty of national experts and researchers with good ideas to consider.
Public housing authorities have to work within these constraints. Locally, their performance seems to be a bit of a mixed bag. CHA has done a lot to entice landlords to participate in the Housing Choice Voucher program, including offering tax abatements and incentive payments for landlords in wealthier areas, and making vacancy payments to qualified units in between HCV tenants. It also offers a boost to voucher values of 50% to encourage tenants to rent in parts of the city with better schools, safety and job opportunity (“mobility areas”). HACC does something similar.
But at the same time, CHA also doesn’t appear to be particularly quick to process applications. In the 52-page “pocket guide” that it provides to voucher recipients, it tells them to expect the unit approval process to take 36 business days. That means recipients (and landlords) can expect to wait for a month and a half between when a landlord agrees to rent to a tenant, and the tenant can move into the unit.
I’m also less concerned about what CHA says it does, and more concerned about the results. Those aren’t great. In 2021, South Side Weekly found that the CHA took substantially longer to approve paperwork than the New York City or King County Housing Authorities. In Chicago, almost a third of tenant applications took 50 or more days to approve. That figure was 0% in New York City, and only 14% in King County (home to Seattle).
Source: South Side Weekly
The article cited experts who suggested that the CHA manage more of the process concurrently, and frontload approval of the monthly rent amount, so that leases can begin immediately after a unit is inspected. I’d like to dig further into these issues in the future – but it sure looks like there’s room for improvement on the inspection and approval timelines. Given the equally long search times and worse success rates at the Housing Authority of Cook County, it’s hard to believe that the HACC is doing a much better job.
Our housing shortage makes this problem worse
Housing choice voucher applicants operate near the bottom of the housing market, held back by limited resources, suspicious landlords, and slow-moving housing authorities. It’s important to understand and fix those problems. But it’s also important to remember the first part of the sentence: housing choice voucher applicants operate in the housing market.
When housing markets are tight and landlords have power, rents go up. While market rate tenants may be forced to move, or shovel more money into rental payments, voucher holders can get locked out of the market entirely. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that voucher search times have gotten so much worse since 2020, when the housing market took off. Since 2019, available housing inventory in Illinois has fallen off a cliff, vacant rental units have declined and rents have continued to spike:
When there are fewer home available to buy or rent, voucher holders are left in the cold. In a 2023 study, researchers observe that “the most obvious predictor of lease-up is the rental vacancy rate,” and find that changes in market vacancy rates have a far bigger impact on the likelihood of voucher holder getting a unit than their race or whether a state has banned discrimination on the basis of income.6 In Chicago specifically, researchers find that a one percent increase in rental vacancy rates results in a two percentage increase in the odds that a voucher holder finds a place to live.
I want to be really clear about this: the single best thing we can do to help voucher holders find a place to live is to make it easier for everyone to find a place to live.
Tight housing markets also mean that when families do find housing, it’s likely to be more segregated. If landlords in Lakeview have lines around the block, a voucher holder doesn’t stand a chance. Instead, they’ll be limited to renting from landlords who serve the bottom of the market and specialize in Housing Choice Vouchers. Guess where those units are located:
Source: WBEZ.
This is the second tragedy of the current process. Not only does a tight housing market leave families searching for longer, but it keeps them packed into neighborhoods with fewer opportunities and resources.
That segregation has enormous costs. We know, because there was a time when Chicago did run a voucher program that supported integration. From 1976 to 1998, the Gatreaux decision forced the city to move thousands of low-income Black families into whiter, higher income neighborhoods. Decades later, children in those families earned 20% more, were 10% more likely to own a home, and were 24% more likely to be married than children who had been moved to less-integrated neighborhoods.
The enemy is all around you
In the last legislative session, two bills could have started to fix this. HB1813 and HB1814 would have legalized accessory dwelling units and two- three and four-flats statewide. That would’ve expanded rental options for everyone, but they’d make the biggest difference for families with vouchers. Not only would families have shorter search times and more opportunity, but lower market rents would mean that we could support more families with our existing stock of housing voucher dollars.
Unfortunately, despite receiving support from the Governor and Speaker of the House, neither bill made it to the floor, primarily due to opposition from a small number of hard-left groups on the Northwest side,7 and lobbying from wealthy towns and villages in the northern and western suburbs.
And that’s the problem with a story about voucher holders that starts and ends with racist landlords. It’s easy for an NPR-listening suburbanite to hear a story about racist landlords and shake their head in disappointment. But how many of them know that as that story ran, their tax dollars were being used to help kill a solution to this exact problem?8
Getting the details right matters
If this is all profoundly discouraging to read, well, I agree. But, despite all of these barriers and dysfunction, the voucher program remains one of our most effective tools to fight homelessness. And, even without any additional money, we could make this program much more effective. I think that’s worth fighting for.
It’s also more than triple the number of households in ‘traditional’ CHA public housing (12,561).
Nationally, 69% of non-elderly, non-disabled households with a voucher were working in 2016, or had been recently.
Specifically, the very largest PHA’s may be different from the broader average (Chicago actually has faster search times than LA, for example). And CHA is a Moving to Work agency, which is a special HUD designation that affords it greater regulatory flexibility than most PHAs. If you’re interested in learning more, the Furman Center report on this is really informative (and enraging).
Note that there are a lot of other financial issues with HACC right now as well that are beyond the scope of this already-too-long article.
To expand on this argument slightly – a landlord still can use normal tools like credit worthiness, past rental history or total income (factoring in the voucher payment) to screen HCV applicants, along with anyone else. They just can’t use the shortcut of an HCV to exclude applicants who would otherwise qualify based on those other factors.
Page 17 of the linked PDF
More to come there, but the witness slips of supporters and opponents is available here. For now, I’d just observe that blocking new, low-cost housing in wealthy neighborhoods is a hell of a stance for self-described progressives to take.
The list of opposed witness slips is loaded with town managers and mayors from places like Naperville, Northfield, Oak Brook and Elmhurst. But the last place award for lowest of the low goes to the Village of Glenview, which thought it necessary to hire a lobbyist to fight a bill that might let a few single family homes be replaced with duplexes or triplexes.