In June the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a sweeping change in how it calculates rent payments for Housing Choice Vouchers, aka Section 8. Now the Chicago Housing Authority is worried that the change might lead to a mass displacement of voucher holders who would see the value of their vouchers decrease. But fair housing advocates are more worried that HUD’s proposal could prevent voucher families from moving to better neighborhoods.
HUD’s proposal would instead tie Section 8 rents to “small area fair market rent,” narrowing the geographic area used for voucher rent calculations down to zip codes.
Seiling points out that a new federal law signed by President Obama in July protects families from seeing a decline in subsidies if they remain in a unit that was leased before zipcode-based standards were applied.
“In denser areas like Chicago—where neighborhoods and rent levels change at a much smaller geography than zip codes—it wouldn’t be a good option to reduce segregation,” says Marisa Novara of the Metropolitan Planning Council, because one zip code can encompass drastically different real estate markets. The same problem we have now would persist, she argues, just on a smaller scale.
“We’ve always used census tracts, because there are just so many submarkets within a zip code,” says Klepper, “and they all have different racial compositions and poverty levels.”
