Housing voucher programs need support

There is no human need more basic than shelter, yet thousands of people in Lewiston and throughout Maine lack homes they can afford. Languishing largely outside public view and understanding, they occupy floors and sofas at friends’ and relatives’ houses, sleep in cars or shelters, or occupy housing units that require so much of their monthly incomes that there is not enough left for other basic necessities like food and health care.

The instability of such living conditions can be deeply unsettling for adults and nothing short of traumatic for children.

Beyond the human misery and pain that accompanies such severe housing instability lies significant challenges to our efforts at economic revitalization.

Many of those affected are working or want to work, but those efforts are jeopardized daily by their housing challenges. Others are too frail or disabled to work and face health or mental health problems that worsen each day that they lack stable housing, costing all of us through overburdened emergency services systems.

This problem has grown much worse in recent years.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported to Congress that a record number of very low-income households have severe housing problems. The report found “dramatic increases in worst-case housing needs that cut across demographic groups, household types and regions,” and that only 32 units of adequate, affordable rental housing are available for every 100 extremely low-income renters.

One of the most effective tools that the federal government has used to remedy this crisis is the Housing Choice Voucher Program. The basic premise is simple: income-eligible households seek out modest housing on the local, private market and pay 30 percent of their income toward the rent; the federal government pays the difference between that amount and the monthly rent due to the landlord.

This public-private partnership supports local economies (Maine receives about $80 million each year through the Housing Choice Voucher Program, most of which flows directly to small-business landlords) while ensuring that vulnerable people have stable housing. Supported on both sides of the aisle, the voucher program was described by the Bush administration as “a cost-effective means for delivering decent, safe and sanitary housing to low-income families.”

Unfortunately, Lewiston and cities across the U.S. have suffered from the federal government’s waning commitment to helping new families through this successful program. From 1976 to 2001, the federal government annually provided housing vouchers to 65,000 new families nationwide not previously receiving housing assistance. Since 2001, that support has fallen to less than 7,000 new families per year.

That’s one reason why 400 families are now sitting on the Lewiston Housing Authority’s voucher waiting list, though that number would undoubtedly be much higher if the list hadn’t been closed to new applicants for all but one week during the past three years.

In the areas of Androscoggin County outside Lewiston and Auburn, another 150 families are on a waiting list that was recently opened for the first time in more than a year; applicants on this list applied as long ago as 2006. Meanwhile, voucher waiting lists around the state total more than 12,800 households.

While we are living in an era of fiscal belt-tightening, the Obama administration recognizes the impact of the rental housing crisis on local communities and proposed to balance painful cuts to certain programs with a modest increase in housing vouchers for homeless and special-needs populations.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted earlier this month to eliminate these vouchers, but Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins have an opportunity to help restore them in deliberations set to begin soon in the Senate.

Another proposal that deserves the strong support of Maine’s congressional delegation is the Section Eight Voucher Reform Act. This no-brainer legislation would streamline the rules that govern the housing voucher program and make it more efficient, allowing the program to serve more people more efficiently, while actually reducing the cost of the program and, by extension, the federal deficit.

SEVRA has received bipartisan support in past sessions of Congress, but has failed to win passage, primarily due to lack of attention. We should not allow that to happen again. How often do we have the opportunity to help more people at less cost?

The Housing Choice Voucher Program lifts communities by giving low-income families the stability they need to find and retain jobs, treat health and mental health care problems, and maintain the educational continuity that their children need.

These impacts were recently documented in a 12-minute film, based in Maine, “Along the Way Home,” and accessible at www.alongthewayhome.org. We would do well to learn from its lessons and build on the successes that the voucher program has helped engender here and around the country.

Laurent F. Gilbert Sr. is mayor of Lewiston.