House and Senate Funding Bills Risk Loss of Rental Assistance For Thousands of Low-Income Families

Posted under Industry News on October 25, 2011

House and Senate Funding Bills Risk Loss of Rental Assistance For Thousands of Low-Income Families, by Douglas Rice at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, anticipates “deep and disproportionate cuts” in the HUD funding bill for FY 2012 and suggests that Congress could prevent the loss of rental assistance for tens of thousands of low-income families by combining key features of bills approved by the House and Senate committees.

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

The House Transportation-HUD Appropriations Subcommittee and the full Senate Appropriations Committee have approved fiscal year 2012 funding bills that would make deep cuts in the budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The proposed cuts, which are much deeper than the average reductions that the recently-enacted Budget Control Act mandates, would reduce the HUD budget to the lowest level in a decade, in inflation-adjusted terms.
In press releases accompanying the bills, the House and Senate committees, to their credit, expressed a commitment to preserving federal rental assistance for the low-income families currently receiving it. Because of the depth of the proposed cuts to the HUD budget overall, however, neither bill achieves this goal:

  • The House and Senate bills fail, for example, to provide funding to renew Housing Choice vouchers now used by 25,000 to 40,000 low-income families.
  • The bills also deeply underfund public housing. Following the significant reductions in public housing capital funding made over the last decade, these further cuts would expose low-income families, most of whom include people who are elderly or have serious disabilities, to deteriorating or even hazardous living conditions. They would also accelerate the loss of this important source of affordable housing in many communities.

For many low-income families, these cuts would come at a particularly difficult time. The number of renter families with “worst-case housing needs”—that is, who receive no housing assistance and either pay more than half their income for housing or live in severely substandard housing—had already risen by more than 40 percent over the last decade even before the recession hit. Federal rental assistance programs currently serve only one in four eligible low-income families due to funding limitations.

As the House and Senate negotiate a final HUD 2012 budget over the coming weeks, they should place a priority on restoring sufficient funding to ensure that no low-income family will lose rental assistance and that local housing agencies are able to maintain public housing in decent condition. By combining various features from the House and Senate bills, Congress can achieve these important goals in the final legislation.

Source: The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities