Embrace the Suck: Why States and Localities Should Use Property Rights to Fix Broken Housing Voucher Programs

Abstract

The largest federal affordable housing program is an income supplement program called Housing Choice Vouchers (formerly Section 8). When a low-income person has a housing voucher, they find and rent privately-owned, market-rate housing. The tenant pays a portion of the rent and the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development pays the rest of the rent directly to the landlord. Unfortunately, most voucher-holders end up renting in high-poverty neighborhoods and more than one in three tenants who receive a housing voucher are unable to use it before it expires. This is because most private landlords choose not to rent to tenants with housing vouchers. For many housing advocates, these glaring failures in the Housing Choice Voucher Program are proof that Congress’s decades-old decision to turn away from publicly-owned affordable housing and towards market actors was a mistake. More than a dozen states and scores of localities have attempted to fix this broken federal program by granting tenants a human or civil right to pay rent with a housing voucher, known as source-of-income discrimination laws. Using both data and political economy theory, this article first explains why this human rights approach to fixing federal housing voucher programs hasn’t been successful. The phrase “Embrace the Suck” was coined by members of the U.S. military as a mantra for persevering through hardship not of one’s own making. This Article argues that states and localities can get the most out of broken federal housing voucher programs by “embracing the suck” of federal housing policy’s reliance on private property owners’ managerial discretion. Instead of attempting to limit this discretion by granting tenants oppositional human rights, states and localities should imbue vouchers with additional property rights and entitlements to increase voucher holders’ ability to compete in the private rental market. For example, states or localities can tie preferential property tax rates, expedited permitting status, and enhanced public services to housing vouchers to create demand for voucher-holding tenants among a broader range of landlords. Drawing from Progressive Property scholars and their forebearers, this Article argues that these additional property rights and incentives should be designed to promote the self-determination and economic agency of voucher holders in choosing where to live.

Keywords: Housing Choice Vouchers, Federal Affordable Housing Program, Progressive Property