City housing officials to seek delay for Section 8 changes
Housing officials in Pittsburgh will ask the federal government to allow them not to implement a new payment system — which had been set to take effect April 1 — that aims to give greater neighborhood choice to Section 8 voucher holders.
Following pushback at two public hearings Tuesday, the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh will request a waiver from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, giving officials more time to develop a methodology to give voucher holders more choices about where to live.
The Housing Choice Voucher Program, commonly referred to as Section 8, is a federal program that assists low-income people in need of affordable housing by paying a portion of their rent. Critics say HUD’s method of calculating fair market rent, among other factors, contributes to concentrating voucher holders in high-poverty neighborhoods.
The current fair market rent calculation uses a seven-county metropolitan region — combining Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Washington and Westmoreland
counties — that prices voucher holders out of some high-rent Pittsburgh neighborhoods. An analysis last year by the Pittsburgh PostGazette found that many of the city’s 5,100 voucher holders were concentrated in certain neighborhoods.
Because of a HUD directive, in addition to a federal lawsuit brought by civil rights groups, a new system of calculating fair market rent by ZIP code, rather than metropolitan area, was set to take effect April 1.
The proposed changes aim to lower the concentration of voucher holders in high-poverty neighborhoods and offer landlords in lowpoverty areas incentives to accept tenants with vouchers. City housing authority officials say a ZIP code is more precise than a sevencounty rent calculation, but ZIP code boundaries often do not align with Pittsburgh neighborhoods or rental market boundaries.
At a public hearing Tuesday, several landlords said they lauded the goal of giving more neighborhood options to voucher holders but said the proposed changes would hurt their bottom line and ultimately result in fewer units for low-income households.
Housing authority officials said Wednesday that such input contributed to their decision to ask HUD for extra time to convene a group of landlords, tenants and advocacy organizations to develop a methodology that is more neighborhoodspecific than the ZIP codebased plan. They said they want a methodology that “responds to the unique local conditions of the Pittsburgh market” and have it in place by early 2019.
Pushback was particularly vigorous from landl o r d s and community groups from Hazelwood, whose payment standard was set to decline under the ZIP code-based system. Many believe the city neighborhood is on the brink of growth and development.
“This is going to work against the agenda Hazelwood has for itself over the next 10 years,” said Dave Brewton, director of real estate for community group Hazelwood Initiative Inc., saying he did not want to see low-income residents displaced just as the area was about to see new investment.
Cutting the payment standard “will hurt our landlords, it’s going to hurt our low-income tenants, it’s going to hurt our future,” he said.
The 178-acre Hazelwood Green site is widely considered to be a contender for Amazon’s HQ2. Even if it doesn’t end up as the second home of the online retail giant, the former LTV Coke Works is still considered a prime development site.
“We appreciate that there is an incentive for people getting access to places like Shadyside and Squirrel Hill … places where there may not have been a lot of vouchers being used,” said Laura Wiens, director of Pittsburghers for Public Transit. But she noted, “We don’t want to see low-income people being pushed out” of neighborhoods such as Hazelwood.
The Allegheny County Housing Authority currently has a three-tiered payment system broken down by municipality, and officials there are still reviewing ZIP code data to see how proposed changes would impact their program, executive director Frank Aggazio said.