Is America's Housing Choice Voucher Programme a 'mythical unicorn that nobody ever gets?” asks Alex, the main character in Netflix’s new series “Maid”
Housing-policy wonks often refer to the voucher programme as a kind of lottery: win and your life may fundamentally change. When towering public-housing projects were demolished in the 1990s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development used vouchers as a way to house America’s poor through the private market. With a voucher, tenants put 30% of their monthly income towards rent and the federal government covers the rest.
But not everyone wins the lottery. Many cities have had to close their waiting lists. A new study from the Housing Initiative at Penn, a research outfit at the University of Pennsylvania, estimates that 10.4m households would be eligible for a voucher under’s criteria, four times as many families as there are vouchers for.
The biggest barrier to using a voucher may be the outsize role that landlords play in choosing whom to rent to. Eva Rosen, of the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, says landlords exist on a spectrum. On one end, there are property-owners in poor neighbourhoods who seek out voucher-holders because they like the security of knowing that the government will pay some of their tenants’ rent each month.