To reform subsidized housing, ask the tenants
Residents want a stronger say in places they live
For years, they have complained about poor living conditions in their homes. They have pleaded with their elected leaders. They have even filed lawsuits.
But tenants living in government-subsidized housing say it’s not enough — and that the current inspection system does not make their voices heard. They’re now pushing for a much stronger say over their own homes.
Shalonda Rivers is a prominent tenant activist who lives in a Florida property owned by the Millennia Companies, a Cleveland firm with more than 250 properties across the U.S. that has been criticized by residents who say they have faced health and safety hazards. Rivers went to Congress in 2019 to champion reforms. The proposals she advocated included
a way for tenants to put their rent toward repairing broken buildings and the power to call for inspections themselves.
Advocates are hopeful they’ll get somewhere in the new session of Congress and with new leadership in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The National Alliance of HUD Tenants sent a letter of recommendation to the Biden-Harris transition team, including a bullet-pointed summary of their Tenant Empowerment Act. Here’s what reform experts and advocates are suggesting:
Where do tenants fit in proposed solutions?
The National Alliance of HUD Tenants drafted the Tenant Empowerment Act in 2019.
Among the provisions, the Tenant Empowerment Act would allow tenants who are living in buildings HUD has found substandard to put rent in escrow instead of paying it to their landlord. It also would provide for tenants to be included in HUD’s physical inspections, accompanying inspectors in common areas and picking five units they wanted inspected. Tenants could trigger a HUD inspection themselves with 25 percent support.
Texas Housers, a low-income housing advocacy group, proposes a HUD Field Office Tenant Residents Council that would meet twice a year with HUD officials. The organization also suggests a tenant satisfaction score based on a survey of tenants and incorporating tenant-reported issues with management into the score. The group’s proposals also include giving tenants the option to convert to a housing choice voucher on their first and fifth anniversaries at a property. Housing choice vouchers are a subsidy that ties to the tenant and can be used at any property, not just a subsidized one, so that option would give tenants options to move. When Millennia tenant Tina Harris went before Galveston City Council in 2019 seeking help with conditions she said were sickening her daughter, she told the members that she couldn’t afford to leave the complex since it would mean leaving behind the subsidy.
A bill put forth by Florida’s Rep. Al Lawson in 2019, the HUD Inspection Oversight Act, proposed that if an owner was in violation of HUD standards, HUD would need to work with tenants to make a remediation plan.
Are there any other suggested changes to HUD inspections and follow-ups?
Many. The National Alliance of HUD Tenants drafted the Tenant Empowerment Bill, which would require HUD inspectors to consult local code enforcement records, if they’re available.
It also would change how HUD deals with safety hazards: It would require inspectors who note what may be environmental hazards, such as potential mold, to get independent environmental testing and create remediation plans. Currently, owners self-certify to HUD that they have fixed health and safety violations. Under a bill drafted by the National Alliance of HUD Tenants, HUD would have to inspect to ensure they are fixed.
In a study on project-based rental assistance properties in the Houston area, Texas Housers has suggested including a Community Assessment Score. The score would be based on a neighborhood’s crime rate, poverty concentration, environmental health data and school performance measures, and it would be factored into HUD’s calculations for how much owners get subsidized. As a consequence for two failing physical HUD inspections in a row, Texas Housers proposes that HUD contracts be immediately terminated and tenants be issued housing choice vouchers. With a housing choice voucher, the subsidy would be tied to the tenant, rather than the complex. Vouchers, however, can present problems of their own; in Texas, landlords are allowed to reject tenant applicants because they have a voucher.
Lawson’s proposed HUD Inspection Oversight Act included a stipulation that if a property did not correct HUD-identified deficiencies in time, HUD should immediately require a management change. The bill also would have required HUD to fine the owner/ manager and put the money toward repairing the property.
So all of these are adjustments to the system we currently have. Has anyone suggested a new system?
Advocates, especially in the tenant union organizer sphere, have repeatedly called for a move to an entirely new paradigm of subsidized housing. Texas Housers suggests that HUD transfer project-based Section 8 contracts to the tenants themselves and have them run properties like a co-op.
Moms 4 Housing set off a movement in Oakland, Calif., when a group of unhoused mothers took over a vacant house and refused to leave until they were evicted in January 2020. They wound up getting the property back after it was placed in a community land trust. Community land trusts, used all over the country, are generally nonprofits aimed at keeping homes affordable by having people buy their homes, but not the land. Land trusts lease the land, often long term, and the homeowners are able to sell the house they’ve bought at a restricted price. The community land trusts aren’t new, but the movement around taking over vacant houses and putting them in land trusts to house the homeless got traction through Moms 4 Housing.
Is there anywhere that does affordable housing well?
Vienna is held up as a model of how to create quality affordable housing with community and business buy-in. About 60 percent of the Austrian capital’s population lives in “social housing,” and about one-third of new apartments every year are subsidized by the government. (In the U.S., HUD assists about 5 million households — not even 5 percent of the population.)
Private developers compete for the land and contracts, submitting their plans to juries of housing experts and architects (the private developer competition was introduced in 1995). The proposals are not judged based on cost alone: The juries deliberate on architectural quality, sustainability and eco-friendliness as well as cost. Vienna’s social housing is paid for by a mix of income tax, a tax on corporations and a housing-specific tax that everyone, regardless of their living status, pays into — reinforcing the ethos that everyone has a stake in high-quality social housing, not just the poorest of the poor.
The developments wind up with a mixed range of incomes rather than just the lowest income, and rent on most forms of social housing is capped at 25 percent of a family income. (In the U.S., people paying 30 percent or more of their income on rent are considered “rent burdened.”) While public housing in the United States constantly reassesses tenants’ income, Vienna’s social housing is a spot for life. While there’s a cap on initial income to qualify, residents who get pay raises can stay in their homes.
A few left-wing political candidates, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, have supported similar ideas, but such an overhaul and a shift toward more government influence (and spending, which would require tax increases) on housing would be extremely difficult in the U.S., where HUD’s budget routinely gets slashed. But advocates say in the long term, the savings of a social housing model would overcome the short-term cost. The U.S. has a $70 billion backlog in public housing capital for repairs and deferred maintenance and a growing need for public housing that has been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.