It fell to housing official William Murphy to face the hearing room packed with Montgomery County's poor -- disabled men and women, low-wage parents with sleeping children in their arms -- and to break the bad news.
Because of new limits on federal funding, he explained, many of the county's struggling renters are likely to have to start paying $25, $100 even $200 more each month for their apartments.
His words drew a collective gasp from the crowd.
"If we didn't have to do this, believe me, we wouldn't do it," Murphy, rental assistance director for the county's Housing Opportunities Commission, told the audience. "We're only doing this because we need to."
Bukika Holmes -- a student, mother, and worker still wearing her Krispy Kreme cap and badge -- was stunned. "I just make it by the skin of my teeth," she said later.
Across the Washington region and the nation, housing authorities say they are being forced to increase the burden on low-income renters, cut off access to rent vouchers or take other measures to cope with changes to the nation's leading affordable housing program.
In April, the federal government capped the amount of reimbursement it sends local housing agencies that subsidize rents for low-income families. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released new rent guidelines for the program, effectively reducing the value of most vouchers used in this region.
Beyond likely rent increases, local officials say the federal cuts could leave tenants with fewer choices of where to use their vouchers, forcing them back into the poorest neighborhoods and re-creating the concentration of poverty that the Housing Choice Voucher program was designed to counteract.
"We might as well take the word 'choice' out of it," said Peggy Pimentel, director of Arlington's program and chairwoman of a regional housing committee. "This will create a hardship for families."
In an interview Friday, Michael Liu, assistant secretary at HUD, defended the changes, saying that costs for the voucher program are out of control. "The bottom line is we want to get the best hold we can on reality," he said.
The $14.4 billion voucher program, long known as Section 8, helps about 2 million households nationwide -- including 30,000 poor families and disabled and elderly people in the District and it suburbs in Maryland and Virginia.
The vouchers are intended to close the gap between the rent on a modest apartment and what a poor family can afford. The family contributes 30 percent of its income toward the rent, and the voucher makes up the difference.
But in the past year, the federal government has decided that local housing authorities will be reimbursed based on a formula rather than for actual costs. Then last week, HUD posted a new schedule of fair market rents, the department's assessment of what homes cost across the country.
In the Washington region, HUD determined that the rent for studio and one-bedroom apartments had increased slightly, but that it was down 2.5 percent for a two-bedroom unit and 7 percent for a three-bedroom.
