In many cities, towns, and rural communities across the country, families struggle to afford safe, reliable housing. Although the proportion of renters spending more than 30 percent of their income has decreased in recent years, a 2016 Harvard study found that 11.4 million households spend more than half of their income on rent. The housing choice voucher program assists more than 5 million people, including low-income families, the elderly, and individuals with disabilities, to pay rent for housing on the private market. A rigorous evaluation conducted over a four-year period found that vouchers reduced the number of families with children that lived in shelters or on the streets by 75 percent. Reducing relocation for school age children has direct benefits for long-term health, development, and education gains. Despite these benefits, it is difficult for families facing a housing crisis to obtain basic information on the program and how to take advantage of it.
The housing voucher program lacks a central database on wait lists. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funds the program, but it is administered by a network of state and local public housing agencies that determine many of their own policies. The demand for housing vouchers dramatically exceeds supply, so local public housing agencies set up wait lists. Affordable Housing Online, a website to help low-income Americans find information about housing assistance and other housing opportunities, says that all of the estimated 2,320 public housing agencies have wait lists.
HUD regularly receives calls from citizens asking for information on the voucher program that is only available at the local level, such as the amount of housing assistance available in their area, the length of the wait list, and how to join the wait list. The current HUD website refers individuals to the general email and phone number for each public housing authority, which they must then contact one-by-one. Opening this wait list data in a single online platform would reduce the information burden on families seeking housing choice voucher assistance.
In addition to standardizing key wait list fields for each public housing agency, HUD can require local agencies to report data at standard intervals. HUD should explore how to best develop a simple, open source platform for public housing agencies to submit relevant data and then host a public website with the information all in one place. By reducing the difficulty of locating and using public housing vouchers, HUD will remove one barrier for low-income families who seek to move into safer neighborhoods with steady housing.