In October 2013, some renters in Charlotte, N.C., received notice: To maintain their federal housing assistance, they soon would be required to work.
The requirement wasn’t onerous, just 15 hours a week. But it was the start of the Charlotte Housing Authority’s efforts to move people off the rolls and toward being able to afford housing on their own.
Today, there’s a waiting list of more than 13,000 households for housing vouchers in Charlotte. Usually, the list is closed — at the time the notices were sent out, the list had opened up only once in the millennium.
Across the country, one in every four people who qualify for federal housing aid receive it. To close that gap, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson proposed getting people off assistance and into self-sufficiency, including through experimentation with work requirements. The former neurosurgeon argues that if people get good jobs, they can move out of government-assisted housing or give up vouchers. That, in turn, would open up spots for others who need them.
Carson and congressional Republicans are seeking to pass legislation this year that would allow housing authorities all over the country to experiment with work requirements and other changes meant to encourage work.
They’re basing their case for the overhaul on the track record of the program that allowed Charlotte to experiment with several pro-work policies.
The program is a demonstration project known as Moving to Work, authorized by Congress in 1996. The project has given 39 housing authorities, out of the 3,000-plus nationwide, the flexibility to try new programs and to experiment with rents.
Under the current HUD system, renters are charged 30 percent of their income and the federal government makes up the difference. Originally, payments were capped as a share of renters’ income. Over time, though, many housing officials have seen that rent calculation as a deterrent to work, because it means that rent rises when household income rises — effectively placing a surtax on work.
As a result, housing authorities are interested in Carson’s bill as well as separate legislation drafted by Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Fla.
Although housing agencies in the Moving to Work program have been able to cut down significantly on administrative work — a major achievement — there is no comprehensive, authoritative evidence that the demonstration has yielded the benefits that Carson is most eager for: greater employment, marriage, and self-sufficiency for beneficiaries.
“There aren’t enough conclusions yet on the impact of work requirements without case management, nor on the impact of changing rent calculations to encourage more earned income in the household,” said Adrianne Todman, CEO of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials and the former executive director of the D.C. Housing Authority.
Charlotte’s experience with rent reform and work requirements is the only example of a Moving to Work experiment that has been subjected to an exhaustive review.
At five of its public housing sites, Charlotte required 15 hours of work a week from the head of the household. Otherwise, the household faced higher rents and ultimately eviction.
The work requirement, though, was paired with added services to help residents find jobs, such as on-site case managers who helped with the job search and arranging transportation. Altogether, the authority calls the policy “supportive services with a work requirement.”
The early evidence wasn’t conclusive, suggesting that the experiment might not be helping, but at least wasn’t hurting.
Researchers with the University of North Carolina’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies examined the results in 2015. They found no evidence that the work requirements had led to evictions. And they found some indications, albeit inconclusive, that the requirements had increased the number of people who had moved out of subsidized housing into places they paid for themselves. More recently, the researchers concluded that employment has grown “sharply” for residents in the experimental group, although they cautioned against extrapolating those results to other cities because Charlotte’s labor market has been hot.
Otherwise, though, there isn’t a lot of evidence one way or another on Moving to Work.
That’s noteworthy particularly because the Republican plan is to overhaul the way rents are set in all cities across the country and to allow wide discretion to local authorities to change the the rules even more.
Specifically, Carson has proposed ceasing the practice of setting rent as a share of income each year. Instead, the rent should be calculated once every three years. The idea is that, in the intervening time, residents would be spared the headache of documenting their income and would be free to earn more without being penalized by higher rent.
HUD is running a test on the policy involving housing authorities in four areas: the District of Columbia, Lexington and Louisville, Ky., and San Antonio. But preliminary results won’t be available until later this year, around the time that the GOP would hope to have legislation already passed for President Trump to sign.
Meanwhile, critics, including low-income housing advocates, have warned that the surest outcome of Carson’s plan would be to stick poor households with higher rents.
Will Fischer, an analyst with the left-of-center Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted that while the results of Moving to Work experiments so far are ambiguous, it’s clear that the added funds dedicated to experiments such as providing more services could have been used to simply ramp up public housing. In 2015, he calculated, the funds shifted to Moving to Work demonstrations could have housed 60,000 families if they had been dedicated to additional vouchers instead.
“A lot fewer families get housing because of that shift,” he said.
House Democrats have proposed to add funding for federal housing and preserve and build new units. Liberals appear skeptical of Moving to Work. Rep. Maxine Waters of California, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, this year obtained a Government Accountability Office report knocking HUD for not having conclusive data and analysis regarding the success of rent reforms, work requirements and other innovations.
Yet some local housing officials say rent reform is necessary and that enough results are in for the federal government to act on them.
San Diego Housing Commission CEO Richard Gentry boasts that incomes rose 25 percent for work-able families from 2013 to 2017 as the agency implemented rent reforms under Moving to Work.
San Diego’s changes encompass several eyed by national Republicans, including moving to certify incomes every two years, rather than annually. The commission also implemented a tiered rent system, meaning that residents don’t face higher rents if their income stays within a certain band, so they can pick up more earnings without fearing a hit to their rent.
The commission also jacked up minimum rents. Nationwide, the minimum rent is set at $50 a month. But, given flexibility, San Diego raised it to $200 and then $300 for individuals.
Raising minimum rents is the most controversial part of the GOP plan, as it would affect the lowest-earning families, people who generally have nothing to spare.
But proponents say it helps to prevent beneficiaries from becoming indifferent to holding down a job. The problem with too-low minimum rents is that it can lead people to quit work capriciously, figuring that if their income goes away, their rent will, too.
“We tried to create a situation where families with us would be rewarded and sanctioned the same as the rest of us,” Gentry said.
The San Diego policies meant to promote work do not apply to the elderly, the disabled, full-time students, or others who are not in a position to hold down a job. Those groups make up most housing assistance beneficiaries in San Diego, as they do across the country. The reforms were also paired with job-finding services.
In general, Moving to Work cities have been “very, very cautious and compassionate” in trying out work requirements, Todman said.
In San Diego, the experiment has saved the commission money, Gentry said, allowing it to buy two hotels and an apartment building to convert to housing for homeless people.
The question of whether the changes have helped people transition to self-sufficiency and off the housing aid rolls, Gentry said, is complicated by the San Diego housing market becoming extremely hot over the same period.
William Russell heads the Sarasota, Fla., Housing Authority, which is not part of Moving to Work. He says he wishes it was, and he has advocated federal legislation to give localities more flexibility.
The problem that Moving to Work cities have addressed is that the practice of charging rent as a constant share of income means that families choose to not take new or better jobs, he said.
“It’s almost like we’re rewarding bad decisions and we’re penalizing good decisions,” Russell said. “That’s the human toll that it is taking on our residents.”
