Earlier this year, the federal government threatened to withhold funding from local housing agencies that don’t comply with an order to scrutinize the citizenship status of their residents.
Dubbed the “Cleaning House” initiative, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development demanded in a letter that agencies “verify citizenship and immigration status” of residents and “strongly encouraged” them to demand documents such as birth certificates, naturalization certificates and passports for people in the Housing Choice Voucher Program, also known as Section 8. The program pays up to 70 percent of a recipient’s rent.
Failure to comply, HUD officials said, could result in the loss of federal funding at a time when housing authorities are already struggling with tightening budgets.
After examining their rolls, leaders at local housing agencies say they’ve found no evidence that ineligible people are improperly receiving benefits. Nevertheless, the local administrators are concerned about further federal rules changes that could raise barriers to housing access and require increased scrutiny of subsidy recipients, both citizens and immigrants alike. Those looming rule changes also come with more onerous administrative costs when federal funding is already in decline.
“We do expect that this administration is going to ask us to check and recheck immigration statuses more often, but right now, they’re just looking at discrepancies between what ICE has on file and what HUD has on file,” said Stephanie Bixby, rental assistance director at Burlington Housing Authority.
According to HUD, a nationwide audit of the Section 8 program discovered that nearly 200,000 tenants need to be checked for eligibility verification, while benefits were improperly provided to nearly 25,000 deceased tenants and nearly 6,000 ineligible non-American tenants.
Housing authorities rely heavily on federal funding. Burlington Housing Authority, the state’s second-largest, receives approximately $25 million annually for its housing voucher program.
As the law stands now, housing authorities are required only to verify someone’s citizenship or immigration status when they first begin receiving subsidies. The new directive from the feds asks them to recheck statuses now to be sure they’re withholding subsidies from those who don’t qualify.
After examining their rolls of approximately 2,200 rent subsidy recipients, Burlington Housing Authority identified 59 households, or 99 individuals, with questionable immigration status. A closer look narrowed it down to just eight households, and the housing authority is reaching out to local immigrant support groups to help this small remainder come up with the proper documentation to ensure they continue to receive benefits.
“We found more people have become U.S. citizens since they had come on to the program,” Bixby said.
The “cleaning house” letter doesn’t change the law around who is eligible for rental subsidies, Bixby said. Immigrants who are ineligible to receive housing subsidies can still live with a subsidized household. But, for the first time in her 12 years at the Burlington Housing Authority, Bixby said she received an actual eligibility list from HUD. People with temporary immigrant statuses, asylum seekers, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, and more have long been ineligible to receive benefits, even before the Trump administration.
The housing authority wouldn’t evict someone if they learned that they were ineligible for benefits, according to Bixby. Instead, the benefits would be adjusted to apply only to eligible members of a household. For instance, if a member of a four-person household was ineligible, their benefits would be reduced by one-fourth.
But that policy could change in the coming months. A new rule proposed by HUD in February would bar “mixed-status” households, which include someone ineligible for benefits, from receiving any rental subsidies at all. It would also codify rules requiring housing authorities to scrutinize residents’ immigration status more consistently, rather than just the customary check when someone enters the program. It would also require housing authorities to verify the citizenship status of U.S. citizens with documents such as birth certificates and passports.
Across the country, this change could “cause nearly 80,000 families to lose their housing assistance, including nearly 37,000 children,” according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an affordable-housing advocacy group.
The Vermont State Housing Authority has previously had “mixed-status” households but does not currently, according to executive director Kathleen Berk. She said the agency would submit a comment on the proposed rule in mid-April. Bixby, of BHA, said she hoped the rule change would not come to pass “because that would mean a huge administrative burden.”
Burlington Housing Authority executive director Steven Murray said the “cleaning house” announcement’s biggest problem was that it was “lacking some emotional intelligence” and had scared tenants who were legally eligible for rent subsidies. If BHA found that a subsidy recipient had become ineligible, all they have to do is update their records at the housing agency, not alert HUD or the Department of Homeland Security to the change, Murray said. And the agency would, of course, pull benefits from someone who is ineligible, Murray said.
With no real change to HUD’s policy at this time, complying with the letter was not a question for Murray.
“As much as we would love to be at the forefront of pushing back, the reality is, I’m not willing to risk 2,200 vouchers or any retaliation from the federal government for them asking fairly for something that might affect a very, very small percentage,” Murray said.
For the neighboring housing authority in diverse Winooski, Katherine “Deac” Decarreau said she was unfazed by the letter. A closer examination of the hundreds who receive housing subsidies reinforced that feeling.
“I didn’t think we had an issue when I read the letter,” she said, “and the reason I didn’t think we had an issue is we would never let anybody into the program who wasn’t legally able to receive benefits.”
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