Burlington Housing Authority plans to yank scores of Section 8 rental assistance vouchers in anticipation of budget cuts by Congress, despite the housing crisis that has led to hundreds living in tents in the Queen City.
The drastic step by the local housing authority will hamper efforts to reduce homelessness in Chittenden County, which has surged in recent years. In fact, it will likely make the problem worse.
This week, the housing authority suspended Section 8 vouchers for about 70 individuals and families who had been issued a voucher but had not yet found an apartment to lease, executive director Steven Murray said. But that step alone won’t be enough to offset what the housing authority expects could be a multimillion dollar budget shortfall in 2025, so the agency is preparing to take more extreme measures, as well.
The housing authority will more aggressively move to revoke vouchers from tenants using them to pay rent when they violate terms of the program, Murray said.
“There will be no second chances this year,” he said.
People wait months or years to claim a Housing Choice Voucher, as the federal aid is also called. The vouchers, the primary form of federal rental assistance, typically require tenants to pay 30 percent of their income toward rent; the government covers the remainder. Recipients can rent from private landlords, nonprofits or local housing authorities.
More than 9,000 apartments across Vermont are rented using Section 8 subsidies, according to federal data. The vouchers can be a ticket out of homelessness for some. The subsidies help others climb out of poverty by ensuring housing costs remain in proportion to their income.
Burlington Housing Authority is reacting to a letter from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that advised local housing authorities across the country to prepare for a 2.5 percent budget reduction next year, Murray said. The estimate was based upon an early proposal in the U.S. Senate. Congress has yet to take up the budget and likely won’t do so until the spring.
Burlington Housing Authority immediately began pulling vouchers that weren’t yet in use rather than wait for final budget figures. That’s because each subsidy is paid monthly to landlords, Murray said: Dropping one voucher in January, for instance, could save as much money as dropping two vouchers in July.
Still, the housing authority expects to drop roughly 260 vouchers from the 2,400 or so it provided last year.
The Burlington Housing Authority is one of eight housing authorities in Vermont, second in size to the Vermont State Housing Authority.
The proposed budget cuts would affect each housing authority, though not necessarily to the same degree. No other housing authority in Vermont appears to have made preemptive cuts to vouchers the way the Burlington authority has done, according to Kathleen Berk, executive director of the Vermont State Housing Authority.
Berk said her agency, which oversees more than 4,000 vouchers, could likely withstand the proposed budget cut without removing vouchers from people who currently use them. Instead, it would save money by shelving a voucher after someone relinquishes one.
“There are so many unknowns about what could happen at the federal level,” Berk said. “We’re getting prepared, but we’re not panicking, and we don’t want to convey that panic to the public right now.”
Winooski Housing Authority executive director Katherine “Deac” Decarreau said her team is still preparing its budget projections.
“We are going to have to look hard at how we’re going to make it through the end of the year,” she said.
Removing a tenant’s housing subsidy is typically a last resort for housing authorities because it often leads to eviction and homelessness.
But Burlington Housing Authority will need to do so, Murray maintained. He has decided to carry out that process by focusing on problem tenants — rather than, say, drawing names randomly or targeting those who don’t have children or disabilities.
“It is much more palatable for us, and probably the community, if we remove people from our program that had broken rules,” Murray reasoned.
Murray met with the state’s federal congressional delegation to lobby for increased funding. He is also considering asking local and state lawmakers to help backfill the budget, noting that the cost of maintaining a voucher is sometimes less than the cost of providing services or a motel room to someone who is homeless.
In a statement on Thursday, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders ( I-Vt.) said shortchanging Section 8 funding would be “unacceptable.”
“Homelessness will increase in our state as a result of Congress’s inaction. I will continue to do all I can to make it clear to my colleagues in Congress that the needs of working families must come before the whims of billionaires,” Sanders said.
Cuts to the voucher program can have a longer-term effect on the supply of affordable housing in Vermont, Decarreau said. Tight market conditions have already made it difficult for housing authorities to persuade private landlords to participate in the Section 8 program.
“It will be very hard, once people move to market-rate rents, to convince anybody to go back to affordable, unless the supply and demand pushes it that way,” Decarreau said.