Should HUD revamp its housing aid? Ben Carson: Conversation Working families, the elderly necessary to begin reform and disabled will all be poorer

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Today, the way the federal government helps millions of Americans pay their rent is broken, and fixing it requires structural reform. The decades-old system the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development uses to calculate tenants’ rent payments is unfair, intrusive, confusing and costly.

Every year, HUD provides housing assistance to 4.7 million low-income families through several housing programs. But every year, it takes more money — millions more — to serve the same number of households.

Today, the average HUD-assisted family living in Florida earning $13,139 a year might pay hundreds of dollars per month in rent or nothing at all, depending on a number of factors. Calculating that family’s subsidy is not easy. The form public-housing authorities use to make this calculation is 14 pages long, resulting in far too many mistakes, including charging similar households wildly different rents. A recent HUD study found that each year approximately 25 percent of rents charged to HUD-assisted families are miscalculated, causing nearly $750 million in improper rent payments.

The current system is not only unfair and confusing, it is also getting more expensive every year.

There are better, simpler, and less intrusive ways to determine a family’s subsidy rather than one that requires residents to undergo invasive annual audits and effectively discourages work by increasing rents when residents find new job opportunities or earn promotions or raises.

Last month, I proposed the Making Affordable Housing Work Act to launch a conversation about how we can fix the way we deliver rental assistance. It is a bold proposal to create a new simplified structure of “core rents” and “choice rents” that offers a more transparent and predictable rent calculation that is easier to operate and easier for both landlords and tenants to understand. It would also put HUD’s rental-assistance programs on a more fiscally sustainable path.

Under the core rent proposal, housing authorities and owners would only be required to verify household income every three years rather than annually. This would encourage residents to increase their earned income without any negative impact on their rent for up to three years. This proposal would ease the administrative burden on publichousing authorities, owners residents, while simultaneously reducing the potential for errors in what families are charged for rent.

We are also proposing to create a menu of “choice rents” that housing authorities and owners may implement to promote greater flexibility in determining rent for nonelderly/non-disabled households. These “choice rents” would offer localities more options that make sense in their local areas, including creating escrow accounts for residents to help them to become less reliant upon housing assistance.

For every family we can help to become self-sufficient, we can assist another family who may have been waiting for years for housing assistance. It is necessary to point out that the rent reforms we are proposing will not increase rents for the elderly and disabled households we currently serve. As a compassionate society, we have a responsibility to take care of the most vulnerable among us.

This is the beginning of a necessary conversation. Congress, our stakeholders and HUD-assisted families will be involved in this conversation every step of the way. But there is one inescapable imperative driving this reform effort — doing nothing is not an option. COMMENTARY |

Where you live shapes your opportunities in life, and the fact that so many of our fellow Floridians can’t afford a decent home for themselves and their families affects all of us. Yet, just as Central Florida begins making progress toward helping struggling families find safe, decent, affordable places to live, along comes a new proposal from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that will take us in the wrong direction. Make no mistake, the agency’s proposal will cause more people and families to become homeless and punish Floridians who already face the biggest obstacles to making ends meet.

While Housing Secretary Ben Carson’s rhetoric in support of the measure focuses on socalled “reforms,” the reality is very different. Let’s detail what the proposal would actually do:

It would increase rents on most families living in housing supported by HUD. Currently, residents in assisted housing pay 30 percent of their adjusted income for rent with the federal support making up the difference. Under the proposed legislation, that figure would rise to 35 percent of the family’s gross income. Shifting to gross income means they would not be able to deduct expenses like medical care and child care in determining how much rent they pay.

It would triple the minimum rent for these families, from $50 to $150 per month. According to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, this would raise rents the most for the poorest families receiving rental assistance from HUD. There are approximately 1.7 million people in these families, and the vast majority of them have incomes of less than $7,000. Included in those families are almost 1 million children. Taking an additional $1,200 from them to cover the higher rent would make it even harder for them to afford basic necessities.

It would increase rents on the elderly and people with disabilities. The poorest and least able to afford housing in the private market would see their rents increased over time to 30 percent of their gross income with a minimum rent of $50 per month.

It would allow HUD, without further legislative approval, to adopt policies that would effectively act as time limits for families to live in federally assisted housing, eventually forcing them out to deal with a market that has no affordable options for them.

It would impose work requirements despite the fact that most recipients able to work already do so. These requirements would do nothing to create the job opportunities necessary to move families toward self-sufficiency. They would instead create additional housing instability, which undermines people’s ability to gain and hold good-paying jobs.

The bulk of the rent increases under the plan would fall on working families, the elderly and people with disabilities. Overall, the plan would raise rents on about 180,000 Florida households by an average of $760 annually.

Why is Carson putting this proposal forward? He hinted at the real reason in an interview with the conservative Heritage Foundation: “We are being realistic as we look at it. We knew what the budget was — with the budgetary constraints that we had to work with — and so we had to make some changes in the rent structure in order to conform with that budget.”

So, this proposal, one that will punish the people in our communities struggling the most to afford a place to live, is nothing more than a cut disguised as “reform” to pay for last year’s tax bill, which overwhelmingly benefits the wealthy and large corporations.

Central Florida is taking steps to become a community in which everyone can find a decent, affordable place to call home. That wasn’t going to happen overnight given where we’re starting from, but should these proposed cuts become law, expect our problems to become much worse.