How to Make Universal Vouchers Actually Work

The Housing Choice Voucher program—often called Section 8—is the federal government’s most effective tool for combating homelessness, keeping more than 2 million families housed each year. While it is effective, it also needs repair. After all, Section 8 is so underfunded that 8.2 million households that qualify for a voucher can’t get one.

But that’s not the only problem.

Nearly one in three households that do get a voucher can’t find a suitable home with a landlord willing to accept it. These households often lose their voucher and their place on a yearslong waiting list, which can be mentally and emotionally damaging, says Vincent Reina, an associate professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania.

“People are on the waitlist for decades,” he says. “They’re making decisions that are affected by something that may never happen, and their outcomes may actually be worse because they’re waiting.”

It’s for that very reason that a new housing system is needed, says Andreanecia Morris, executive director of HousingNOLA, a New Orleans-based housing advocacy group. “Universal vouchers are absolutely a part of that new system, but it needs to be a system that would guarantee housing for all voucher holders.”

To make the Housing Choice Voucher program truly work—that is, give the maximum number of eligible households a voucher and the ability to find a clean and habitable home they can afford in an area that has access to basic amenities like groceries and transportation—housing advocates like Andrew Aurand, vice president for research at the National Low-Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), say the program needs a combination of changes on both the demand and supply sides.

“We need subsidy programs to increase the supply of units available to voucher holders,” Aurand says, “and we need to preserve the affordability and the quality of these units.”

To get to the appropriate combination of systemic changes to fix the Section 8 program “we need to be thinking about different ways to implement things we’ve already tried, and also thinking about new things to make it work from the landlord side,” says Katherine O’Regan, faculty director of New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

“It’s almost like there’s a three-legged stool. You’ve got private market landlords, the voucher households themselves, and the local housing authorities,” she says. “And there are things that we are going to need for each of the legs of that stool to make it work.”

What are some of the most pressing changes that would be needed to allow the Section 8 program to provide stable housing to as many low-income families as possible? 

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