HUD takes a real step forward on testing vouchers as cash
A Q&A on new book on public education, a story about unions + YIMBYs in California, and current spin from anti-abortion activists
Two years ago I published a story for The Atlantic on new discussions that had emerged within the federal housing department about distributing housing aid to low-income renters in the form of cash rather than traditional vouchers. Since 1974 HUD has awarded federal housing vouchers to low-income tenants to find apartments on the private rental market, and it’s a really important lifeline for millions of families. But the program is also really cumbersome and most landlords don’t really want to deal with all the logistical hassle, which involves signing contracts with a public housing agency and passing a formal inspection.
That story looked at why officials were talking about the idea now after all the years — informed in part by new successful experiments during Covid, and by the discovery of decades-old research that everyone had basically forgotten about. The launch of those discussions were a big deal, and federal officials floated a vehicle they thought maybe they could use to test the idea in the future.
Jump to last week, where HUD officials, in closed-to-press sessions, pitched dozens of philanthropies on a formal study to evaluate how cash rental assistance would compare with traditional housing vouchers. My new story for Vox looks at basically what has happened over the last two years and how HUD is now taking real steps forward to put this cash rental experiment into action.
One staggering statistic: Only roughly 60 percent of those awarded a federal housing voucher right now can even find a landlord willing to rent to them. And this is on top of the fact that ~75 percent of those low-income households eligible for vouchers are never even awarded one due to funding constraints. Some key questions researchers have is if cutting out all the bureaucracy of the traditional housing voucher program might enable renters to find housing more easily. And might it even be higher-quality housing?
These are good questions, ones that absolutely merit studying, and what I find exciting about this is that the people involved are not looking at this as a mere academic exercise. They’re clear-eyed about what it might require to approach Congress with an ask to permanently change its nearly 50-year-old $30 billion annual program, and are looking to amass that kind of evidence. I broke that news today and explain in greater detail what HUD is envisioning, what the timeline might be, and where this all came from.
Some other new stories:
A Q&A with education journalist Cara Fitzpatrick whose new book “The Death of Public School” is out today. I talk to her about the book, the dramatic headline, and how the boundaries between church-and-state grew so blurred. Can read that here.
A look at how anti-abortion activists are pressing Republican candidates to go even more extreme on rhetoric and policy to restrict abortion access, and why candidates are starting to question their advice. Maybe it’s partly because abortion rights keep winning on the ballot, and because recent polls show that more than a third of Republican primary voters think abortion should be legal all or most of the time. Another poll released just days before the first GOP primary debate found most Republican primary voters didn’t think it was very important for candidates to talk during the debate about their plans to restrict abortion. You can read that story here.
And lastly a story on how a new influential coalition of California unions and YIMBY activists came to be. One leading housing advocate described it to me as a "perhaps the single most positive shift in California housing discourse, conversations, fights, and politics in the last 40 years." Can read that here.
Thanks for reading!