Apartment buildings in the Portland skyline are seen in September 2023. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has paused new Section 8 housing vouchers for a number of housing authorities around Maine, including Portland, and it’s unclear when vouchers will be issued again. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer
Several of Maine’s largest housing authorities are no longer able to issue federal vouchers to people who can’t afford to pay their own rent.
Public housing authorities in Portland, Westbrook and Brewer, along with MaineHousing – which serves the parts of the state not covered by other housing authorities and issues about one-third of all housing vouchers in the state – received directives from the federal government late last month to temporarily stop issuing Section 8 housing vouchers. With four months left to go in the year, the agencies already have used up their shares of the federal money set aside for the program.
“The challenge we have is big,” said Brian Frost, the executive director of Portland Housing Authority, “We have to have a high enough rental standard for good quality of life. We have to incentivize landlords to take our vouchers. And the rents have been increasing at a higher rate. The funding that we get from HUD doesn’t keep pace with that.”
The Section 8 program is funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, also known as HUD. But the vouchers are administered by local housing authorities.
People who already have vouchers still can use them, and unused vouchers can be transferred to new clients, but no new applications will be approved until the freeze is lifted. No one could say for sure when that will be. And there’s still more than four months left to go in the budget year.
HUD’s state office in Maine could not answer questions this week about the reason for the directive but confirmed that it was only sent out to those select agencies. Other housing authorities, like those in Lewiston and Augusta, are not affected.
However, MaineHousing sent a memo to the state Legislature last week saying it had reached its limit of available funding for Section 8 vouchers.
HUD allotted the agency about $38 million for Section 8 vouchers this year, said Scott Thistle, the communications director at MaineHousing. But the state housing authority currently has 3,805 vouchers in circulation and is expected to spend closer to $39 million by the year’s end, he said.
‘HUD DOESN’T KEEP PACE’
Frost, of the Portland Housing Authority, isn’t optimistic that HUD will lift the freeze anytime soon.
“It’s unlikely we’ll be issuing any new vouchers in 2024,” he said.
Brian Frost, executive director of the Portland Housing Authority, at the agency’s offices in Portland on Tuesday. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has paused new Section 8 housing vouchers for a number of housing authorities around Maine, including Portland, and it’s unclear when vouchers will be issued again. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
He said the Portland Housing Authority was given $30 million to spend on Section 8 vouchers this year and is projected to spend about $31.5 million, funding 2,259 vouchers. Frost said it’s common for housing authorities to go over their budget. He said the agency was over budget in 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2021.
Frost said that HUD typically increases the amount of money Portland receives each year to account for inflation, usually by 3% to 4%. This year, however, there was no increase for inflation. Frost said he has no idea why, because it’s clear to him that housing prices are still rising with inflation.
Terence Miller, an advocacy director at the affordable housing nonprofit Preble Street, said he is deeply concerned about the pause and thinks it will be detrimental for some of his clients.
“This is devastating,” Miller said. “We’re not going to be able to provide a way out for the most well-intentioned, most hardworking person. They are going to be stranded in a shelter.”
Miller said the city’s new housing first program, Housing Opportunities for People in Encampments, or HOPE, which Preble Street is involved in running, relies heavily on Section 8 vouchers to move homeless people into stable housing.
“With that program, we were really seeing movement of people from the streets to housing. And now that voucher is gone. This is an extreme crisis,” he said.
But Thistle, communications director at MaineHousing, said he was optimistic that Section 8 vouchers might be unfrozen in the next few months.
He described the situation as “not unusual and not a crisis” and said the waitlist for Section 8 vouchers remains open so people can still apply.
“We don’t like to slow down voucher issuance, but this is a result really of success. … This is a reflection that vouchers are being used and people are being housed,” Thistle said.
‘IT’S NOT SITTING THERE UNUSED’
The way to get that funding back, Thistle said, is to lower the Section 8 utilization rate. That rate refers to the portion of vouchers that are being utilized, so when a housing authority is operating above 100% utilization, that means it is giving out more Section 8 vouchers than it can pay for.
He said MaineHousing is currently operating at roughly 105% utilization. He said he anticipates that HUD will allow MaineHousing to resume issuing vouchers once the agency gets utilization down to 98% or lower.
The way to get that utilization down is to simply collect unused vouchers and stop issuing more, Thistle said.
Vouchers can go unused for a number of reasons. If a recipient can’t find a place that will accept their voucher with 120 days, they must return it to their housing authority unused. Vouchers are also returned when people die or when they become financially stable enough to pay rent without assistance.
“We’re using everything that the federal government gives us to get people housed. It’s not sitting there unused, it’s being used for its intended purpose of housing people. We would issue more vouchers if we had them,” Thistle said.
Frost reported that the Portland Housing Authority is currently operating at 107% utilization.
But he sees this as a federal funding issue. The funding for housing vouchers is ultimately contingent on congressional budgeting.
Of Maine’s delegation, only the offices of Republican Sen. Susan Collins and Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-1st District, responded to questions about how to address the pause in voucher issuance.
Annie Clark, the communications director for Collins, wrote in an email that the latest budget bill includes a $2.9 billion increase in federal funding for Section 8 vouchers.
“In a time when nearly half of all tenants in Maine cannot afford rent and everyday costs continue to present challenges, rental assistance is a critical resource for Mainers. It’s clear that simply maintaining current funding levels is not sufficient,” Pingree wrote in an emailed statement.
Pingree also pointed to her role on the House Appropriations Committee and said she has pushed to increase funding for Section 8 vouchers next year.
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Publish date : 2024-08-13 13:00:00
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