Categories: Federal
08.28.2013
Public housing authority receives 11,000 Section 8 applications in one week
Public housing authorities (PHAs) across the country are feeling the dire effects of sequestration. With budgets sharply curtailed as a result of the 2011 Budget Control Act, housing authorities have had to freeze the issuance of Section 8 vouchers for low-income individuals and families. Media outlets have begun to cover this crisis, as illustrated by these recent articles on sequestration’s effects in Vermont and Jacksonville.
To add to the current wealth of dismal data, we’ve just received some startling numbers from the Municipal Housing Authority for the City of Yonkers. The Yonkers PHA recently un-froze its Section 8 wait-list and received a staggering 11,000 applications in just a single week.
In an average year, 100 Section 8 households open up due to turnover in Yonkers. It’d thus take 110 years to work through the wait-list generated in seven days. In short, the demand for this housing wildly exceeds the current supply.
Sequestration has made this dire situation worse. The 5.1% sequestration effectively defunded 230 Section 8 vouchers in Yonkers. That’s a little more than 5% of the city’s total. The PHA is removing these vouchers by attrition. As a result, Yonkers will have NO Section 8 lease-ups for at least the next several years.
Making matters worse, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been forced to fund less and less of a local housing authority’s costs for operating both Section 8 and public housing programs. In Yonkers, this has resulted in severe staff cutbacks and continued deferral of essential maintenance. This year alone, HUD funding reductions forced the Yonkers PHA to reduce its total staff by over 11%.
“We are projecting continuing deficits in public housing that we cannot fund, and so we’ll have to make further cuts,” said Joseph Shuldiner, Executive Director of the Yonkers PHA.
If you’ve heard similar stories on the effects of sequestration, please contact us to have them heard on our blog and elsewhere. These stories, as depressing as they are, will help mobilize our elected officials to end sequestration and its dramatic impacts on low-income, working-class and formerly homeless individuals.
Photo caption: Schlobohm Public Housing Development in Yonkers. Photo courtesy of the Municipal Housing Authority for the City of Yonkers.