The ROAD to Housing: Rental Affordability and Housing Stability

This article is part of The Rooftop, a blog and multimedia series from New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. Featuring insights from experts across diverse fields, the series is a home for bold ideas to improve housing in the United States and globally.

The biggest housing bill in decades was passed into law in July. The 21st Century Road to Housing Act is a bipartisan, omnibus legislation that tackles everything from housing supply, affordable housing, housing finance, and program governance in one sweeping package. Among its many provisions: encouraging new construction, cutting burdensome regulations, and easing rules for manufactured housing, much of the ROAD to Housing Act aligns with the national movement to fix the supply crisis by building more homes faster.

In response to this landmark legislation, we asked practitioners across the housing field to share their views on the ROAD Act— where it offers the greatest opportunities, where it missed opportunities, and what needs to happen next for the law to have an impact. Across three editions of The Rooftop in the month of September, we present housing leaders’ views on specific provisions of the law to paint a fuller picture of the opportunity, the challenges, and the road ahead.

This week, we focus on one of the key housing crises—rental affordability and housing stability. Stay tuned for next week’s edition, where experts discuss how the ROAD Act seeks to address the housing supply crisis.

Kristen Klurfield, Bipartisan Policy Center, on the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program

The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program helps more than 2.3 million low-income households nationwide access high-quality affordable rental housing in the private market. Families who successfully use vouchers can gain access to higher-opportunity neighborhoods, achieve greater housing stability, and avoid homelessness, but funding limitations mean the program serves only 1 in 4 eligible households. Landlord participation has also declined in recent years due to increased paperwork, inspection requirements, and misconceptions about HCV households. Families must find their own rental home under the program, so a shrinking pool of willing landlords limits housing search and leasing success. Nearly 40% of households that receive a voucher cannot successfully lease a home, often after waiting years for assistance. 

Section 405 of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act tackles one of the primary barriers landlords cite for opting out: the inspection process. Under the new law, a rental home automatically meets the HCV inspection requirement if it passed an inspection within the past year through another federal housing program, such as the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, or the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Service. Landlords may also request advance inspections rather than wait until an HCV household submits a rental application, and families selected for the program will gain access to lists of local units that have already passed inspection. HUD will need to release implementing guidance before housing authorities can adopt these new flexibilities.

Ben Metcalf, UC Berkeley, on Housing Choice Voucher inspections

In 2010, as a senior policy advisor for multifamily housing, I served as HUD’s lead for the Obama White House Rental Policy Working Group—an effort to improve coordination among federal rental programs. We convened developers and owners of federally-assisted housing to identify the biggest administrative sore spots. The duplication of physical inspections surfaced quickly. Properties supported by multiple federal programs faced redundant inspections of the same buildings, using different schedules, standards, and processes. This imposed unnecessary costs on owners and agencies and subjected residents to repeated intrusions.

The Working Group’s 2011 report proposed a straightforward solution: one sound federal inspection should suffice for multiple programs. However, that recommendation required congressional action, and years passed while waiting for the requisite legislative fix. Section 405 of the ROAD Act finally implements that 2011 vision. By allowing recent inspections conducted under the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, HOME, and Rural Housing Service programs to satisfy housing choice voucher requirements, it reduces needless duplication while preserving oversight. It is a modest, meaningful win for housing providers, public agencies, and residents.

That deserves celebration, but it should also trouble us that Congress needed nearly 15 years to enact such an unobjectionable, good-government reform. We can’t let the ROAD Act be a once-in-a-generation bill. Instead, let’s make it the template for every subsequent Congress: get feedback on what works and what doesn’t, assemble practical, bipartisan improvements and give federal housing programs the tools to deliver better results.

David Weber, Public Housing Authorities Directors Association (PHADA), on the expansion of the Moving To Work demonstration program

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act has many worthy provisions, but few that positively impact the over 3000 local public housing authorities (PHAs) and their residents across the country. Section 405 makes some changes to eliminate duplicative inspection requirements, allow pre-inspections, and remote or video inspections in some limited circumstances, but beyond those tweaks, the bill does nothing to directly improve rental assistance programs. 

Further, the expansion of the Moving To Work Demonstration Program (MTW) is another missed opportunity. Designed to allow local PHAs to modify programs and utilize resources in ways that respond to local conditions, MTW has been proven successful since its inception in 1996. The expansion of MTW authorized in 2016 added significant restrictions and limitations but retained fundamental flexibilities and local control. The expansion included in ROAD, however, imposes so many restrictions and limitations that participation in the new cohort is of little value. It may also undermine the efforts of agencies already participating through added, unnecessary reporting requirements. 

Decades of added layers of federal requirements, sometimes with conflicting goals, have crippled our nation’s public housing program as established under the Housing Act of 1937. The original MTW program allows removal of most of those layers and the resulting inefficiencies, while maintaining accountability. PHADA has long advocated for the expansion of the original MTW program, and in fact, the inspection changes referenced above were originally pioneered by MTW agencies. PHADA has previously proposed broad MTW expansion in a more appropriately named Local Flexibilities Option. Unfortunately, Congress has missed this opportunity to empower PHAs to pursue their mission of providing quality affordable housing to low- and moderate-income households in ways that serve the unique needs of their local communities.

Barbara Duffield, SchoolHouse Connection, on youth homelessness

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act may be a first step toward broader housing reform, but it offers little forward movement for the children currently experiencing homelessness.  Across all 140 pages, the Act does almost nothing to reach the more than 1.5 million children and youth that public schools identified as homeless last year. The Act’s two homelessness-specific provisions — Section 503’s added flexibility for emergency shelter and street outreach, and Section 703’s new reporting requirements for the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness — fail to address homelessness experienced by children.

Fewer than 13% of those children were in shelters or transitional housing when schools identified them. Most were staying temporarily with other people, or in motels. These situations can be just as harmful for their health, education, and development, but leave them ineligible for HUD homeless assistance. Section 503 reaches only the visible forms of homelessness, counted by HUD. The youngest and least visible are written out of the law altogether, including an estimated 446,996 infants and toddlers. 

Fortunately, Congress has strong bipartisan tools at its disposal. The Homeless Children and Youth Act would align HUD’s definition of homelessness with the one schools and early childhood programs already use. The Eviction Crisis Act would keep families housed before homelessness begins. The Family Stability and Opportunity Vouchers Act would reach pregnant women and families with young children. However, until Congress takes them up in earnest, the road runs in only one direction: toward another generation of homelessness.

Editor’s note: The views expressed in the articles on The Rooftop are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policy positions of New America.