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Supporting Section 8 & HUD

Jill

An article from my dear friend Sean, who works in the field, about Section 8 and housing for low-income Americans (HUD, for the unfamiliar, is Housing and Urban Development). Section 8 is a good program because it allows, among other things, a greater degree of neighborhood choice for the families it helps. It also encourages mixed-income housing, meaning that one building will have 90% of its units rented at full cost, and ten percent of them subsidized. Taking a step away from housing projects — which reinforce cyclical poverty, encourage crime and keep poor students at the worst schools — is a step in the right direction. I don’t know as much about this issue as I’d like to, so perhaps there will be more on this later.

6 thoughts on Supporting Section 8 & HUD

  1. Having lived in a home (as a child) that was Section 8, I wish I could say it worked that way. In Columbus, OH the only landlords who were willing to rent to HUD tenants were in dangerous neighborhoods where repairs were few and far between. Every house on the block we lived in was rented to Section 8 recipients. They were filthy and disgusting and needed tons of repairs. But they were owned by one man who had ties with HUD. Later in college I worked for a company which rented properties. It was illegal to refuse to rent to someone who was getting Section 8, but everytime we were approached by someone with a voucher for housing we were instructed to tell them that the apartment was no longer available. It could be a good program, it has promise, but there are too many loopholes and not enough persecutions against people who take advantage of the program let alone those who illegally refuse to participate.

  2. It could be a good program, it has promise, but there are too many loopholes and not enough persecutions against people who take advantage of the program let alone those who illegally refuse to participate.

    Agreed. I can only speak anecdotally, but we lived in a duplex beside a section 8 “couple” (actually, they stuffed 9 people into maybe 600 sq. ft). They dealt drugs out of the house and sold stolen goods out of the garage. They also stole a bunch of stuff out of my garage.

    I agree that it’s a step up from housing projects in a sense. But only if you take Rousseau’s view of humanity.

  3. Jeff, we agreed at the mediation hearing that you would cease from printing these accusations. We didn’t steal that stuff from your garage; we repossessed it from your bourgeois oppressor family in the name of the people. And we weren’t dealing drugs, we were sharing medicine.

    Fascist.

  4. I don’t know much about the program, not being American, but I have to wonder why a landlord would turn down guaranteed money from the Federal Gov. Could it be that there are strings attached? I know where I live, there all kinds of conditions that make renting to people on government programs “dangerous”. Where I live any eviction can be fought with the government as the arbiter with benefit of the doubt given to the tenant. And, you can’t not rent to a person getting government assistance. The rules meant to help the poor mean fewer people are willing to rent housing units at a price affordable by the poor.

  5. I was a super for a small appartment that accepted Section 8. Overall I’d say it was better than renting to people not approved for section 8. All our section 8 folks were working single moms. We didn’t have to try to evict any of them for failure to pay the rent, unlike a few other people. One guy left us owing 2 months rent and an appartment filled with garbage than cost $1000 to hire a complany to clean it.

    The main drawback was none of the section 8 tenents had any home maintenance skills. I was woken up at 3 o’clock in the morning to plunger a toilet more than once. I had to replace the sink pipes too often because they wouldn’t use the strainer. Little things like that mostly.

  6. My sister’s boyfriend is in a Section 8 place that, in fact, looks very nice (had dinner over there once, seemed like a nice building in an okay neighborhood). He’s cheating it just a little by letting his brother stay there, but its not like he has a million extra people in the apartment. The sort of crappy thing is that he and my sister want to move in together (he has been more of a father to her son than her son’s actual father ever was, including taking time off of work, which he never does for other reasons, to watch the sick 2 year old so my sister could go) and yet cannot because he would have to forever lose his section 8 if they did without getting married…though I understand where the section 8 people are coming from on that it is crap for the two of them to have to maintain two households.

    Also…I work on a ‘mixed-income’ housing development construction project, and the lower part of the mixed are just starting to move in (higher part comes later) and I agree with Ron O. We’ve had 2 sewer backups this month…one of which was caused by a pair of underwear. Beyond the boggling with regards to exactly who flushed the undies and why, I will leave it to you to imagine just how large this single pair of underpants had to be to clog plumbing in a brand new building.

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