Help With Housing

A bill aims at getting more poor families into affordable homes.

AMERICA is suffering from an affordable-housing crisis. One in seven American households spends more than half its income on housing, according to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, and the vast majority of them have low incomes. Federal programs meant to alleviate the burden don't suffice.

Currently, 1.8 million families receive Section 8 voucher assistance, the federal government's largest effort to help low-income families find housing. The program subsidizes rents or mortgage payments in privately owned housing. But waiting lists in some areas are astonishingly long. In the District, the number of families on the waiting list is nearly six times as great as the number of vouchers available. Many families being accepted off the District's waiting list today have been waiting five years for housing assistance. In Fairfax County, the list is so long that officials are no longer adding names to it.

The good news is that for the first time in years, there is a prospect that Congress will address these needs. A bill passed by the House this month called the Section 8 Voucher Reform Act contains mostly technical, though helpful, provisions: It changes the formula for how funds are distributed to housing authorities to achieve greater efficiency (last year $1.4 billion in Section 8 vouchers went unused); it allows a family to use a voucher as a down payment on a first-time home purchase; and it simplifies procedures for safety inspections, rent calculations and other aspects of the housing program.

Perhaps most important, the bill is likely to reduce the Section 8 voucher waiting list. It does this by creating 100,000 new vouchers over five years -- allowing a 5 percent boost in the nearly 2 million households now receiving assistance -- and by increasing funding for the family self-sufficiency program, which essentially assigns case managers to help families attain long-term living wages. The bill also requires the Department of Housing and Urban Development to more stringently evaluate both the family self-sufficiency program and another program that deregulates certain housing authorities (including those in the District and Baltimore).

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the legislation will cost about $2.4 billion over five years, and where that money will come from under "pay-go" budgeting rules has not yet been determined. Still, the bill, introduced by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), has been a long time coming, and we urge its passage when it reaches the Senate.