‘A slamming door in my face’
Government red tape, hot housing market among top reasons low-income residents struggle to use vouchers
Just days before Christmas, LaResse Harvey received the gift of a lifetime.
After spending two years on a waiting list, she received a call from the Bristol Housing Authority notifying her she had won the lottery for a government-subsidized housing voucher for lowincome families. The voucher would cover a significant portion of her rent, allowing her to afford a place ranging from $1,089 to $1,144 per month, depending on the location.
Finally, she’d be able to rid herself of the constant anxiety of how she would come up with enough money for rent each month. She imagined never again being stuck in an unhealthy relationship because she couldn’t afford a place on her own. She was thrilled she would soon not have to sleep on her sister’s couch or in her SUV at highway rest stops.
“I was so excited,” Harvey said. “I go online. I start looking for an apartment.”
But after an exhaustive six-month search that brought Harvey to tears at times as she navigated a red-hot housing market and waded through a morass of red tape, Harvey was unable to find a single apartment that would accept the voucher.
On June 21, her lottery ticket expired, unused.
Days before that happened she won a spot in a housing project in Ohio, hundreds of miles away from her work and family.
“It’s unfortunate that I had to leave Connecticut in order to find affordable housing,” she said during one of her recent trips to
Bridgeport for work. “Coming back here, I get sad.”
The maddening plight Harvey endured is all too common, and the problems have worsened.
Half of the thousands of vouchers people won from local housing authorities in Connecticut in recent years went unused, according to a Hearst Connecticut Media Group investigation, which examined hundreds of records, surveyed all 45 local housing authorities in the state that oversee vouchers and interviewed dozens of people.
The problem has been driven by a combination of factors, Hearst Connecticut Media found:
Few local housing authorities allow new voucher recipients to use the rental assistance outside of that city or town.
In rare cases when recipients are permitted to use vouchers in a different city or town, recipients aren’t told how much their voucher is worth in other communities.
A cobweb of federal, state and local government rules outlining how vouchers must be used can be onerous, frustrating voucher recipients as well as landlords.
Voucher recipients often receive little, if any, help to navigate an ultra-competitive market, cut through red tape and find housing where their voucher is eligible to be used. The federal government provides little incentive for local housing authorities to provide such assistance.
Accountability is lacking in some areas. For example, local housing authorities grade themselves on how helpful they are at helping voucher holders find housing. Nearly all give themselves a perfect score.
Landlords said they are reluctant to accept vouchers because of delays associated with tenants being able to use them. This, despite how the Connecticut Supreme Court recently ruled denying tenants because they want to use a voucher is discrimination.
Many who allege they were discriminated against are in limbo due to a growing backlog of federal housing discrimination complaints awaiting investigation.
While these obstacles have long hindered many people from successfully using their vouchers, a hot housing market has driven the number of available units to record lows and prices to new highs — leaving many voucher recipients out of luck.
Before the pandemic, about one-third of vouchers in Connecticut were going unused. Since 2020, 50 percent of all vouchers issued have gone unused — a total of nearly 3,000 unused vouchers statewide.
More than twice as many people in Connecticut are now searching for a place to use their voucher than before the pandemic, federal data show. Several factors are at play: rapidly increasing cost of rent highest rents
The value of these federallyfunded vouchers has not kept pace with the in a state with some of the nationally. In Connecticut, vouchers allow recipients to rent units that cost between $1,054 and $2,339 per month, depending on location. Those figures include a portion of rent recipients must contribute, which varies depending upon their income.
Most housing authorities in Connecticut have not taken the federal government up on their offer to increase the value of the vouchers.
lowest share of vacant rental units
Connecticut has the in the country. This creates fierce competition from renters who don’t have the same bureaucratic obstacles to clear as voucher holders do.
Pamella Heller, an attorney at the Connecticut Fair Housing Center, a nonprofit whose attorneys attempt to dismantle housing discrimination, said her office gets a lot of calls from people begging for help to secure housing before their voucher expires.
“It’s sort of like a perfect storm of all these variables coming together,” she said.
The problem is worse in some communities.
In Bristol, where Harvey won her voucher, about four out of every five vouchers were not successfully leased up in 2021.
In Portland, nine out of 10 vouchers went unused.
“When I first issue the vouchers, they’re very excited. I try and warn them,” said Sue Nellis, the executive director of the Portland Housing Authority. “Some of them have waited for years to get a voucher and they’re all excited when they get it and then at the end of the four to six months, they’ve lost it. I do feel bad about that. I don’t know what else I can do.”
As a result of so many vouchers going unused, the federal government calculated that each month in Connecticut about $1.6 million in funding for affordable housing was going unspent, as of August. That money could have paid to house 1,700 more families each month in the state, federal officials estimated.
“It’s problematic because of all the families that could be served,” the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development wrote in its a recent notice to local housing authorities.
Limited locations
Harvey was surprised when she found out she could only use her voucher in Bristol, two neighboring towns and one nearby village, a small pocket of the state where there are few rentals available.
“So frustrating,” she said of the boundaries.
Officially called Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers, these rent subsidies were created by Congress as a market-driven alternative to troubled public housing projects and to “increase housing choice for lowincome families.”
Yet, many recipients encounter limited choices for where they can use their voucher.
Of the 45 housing authorities in Connecticut that distribute these vouchers, only 10 allow all new recipients to use them wherever they choose. Nine other authorities only allow those who already lived in town at the time they win the voucher
to use it elsewhere. The remaining 26 require anyone who wins a voucher to live in that housing authority’s jurisdiction for the first year.
Several housing authority officials said they limit where the vouchers can be used to increase the chances for those who already live in their towns to win a voucher amid high demand for rent subsidies across the state and the rest of the country.
“That helps us with helping the families within our community,” said Jackie Figueroa, the deputy executive director of the housing authority in Stamford, Charter Oak Communities.
In Stamford, only those who already lived in the city when they won a voucher are allowed to immediately move out.
“One of the greatest features of the program is mobility, so we don’t want to restrict that in any way, or to the least extent possible — but we understand that vouchers are limited,” Figueroa said.
Since 2017, four of the 353 families that were issued a voucher moved out of Stamford. Ninety-one vouchers have not been used.
Greg Kirschner, a civil rights attorney and the leader of the CT Fair Housing Center, takes issue with towns targeting their residents for help.
“That’s a potentially troubling justification for limiting where you can use a voucher,” he said.
Some Connecticut housing authorities have tried to establish lottery formulas that upped the odds local residents would win subsidized housing. But fair housing attorneys have successfully challenged these practices in Darien, Mansfield and Winchester, arguing that allowing these overwhelmingly white towns to direct access to affordable housing to their residents shuts out people of color.
Federal restrictions
Federal rules also drive local housing authority officials to restrict where the 25,300 vouchers they oversee in Connecticut can be used.
That’s because administrative payments the federal government gives to housing authorities to help them cover the costs of doling out vouchers are based, in part, on how many vouchers are used within an authority’s jurisdiction. Allowing too many families to use their voucher elsewhere will lead to fiscal problems.
“With the time and effort you spent doing the calculations, and recertification and eligibility requirements, and then all of a sudden a person wants to go and move … The housing authority put in all that time and effort, and now they’re not getting paid for the administration,” said Joseph D’Ascoli, executive director of the Manchester Housing Authority.