This month, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) proposed a rule that would allow public housing agencies and private multifamily owners to require renters receiving housing assistance to work up to 40 hours per week and to limit assistance to two years.
Housing advocates worry the rule would increase housing instability, reinforce stereotypes that assistance recipients refuse to work and potentially deter people in need from seeking help.
“There’s a false narrative HUD is pushing when it comes to this rule that there are people who are just sitting back and not doing anything,” said Korey Lundin, senior staff attorney for the National Housing Law Project. “We know that is not accurate.”
The rule would apply to public housing, housing choice and project-based vouchers and project-based rental assistance.
Older adults, renters with disabilities, pregnant renters, primary caretakers for children under 6 or people with a disability and students enrolled in secondary education would be exempt from the work requirement. Under the rule, only older adults and renters with disabilities would be exempt from time limits, but public housing authorities and property owners could allow other renters to be exempt.
Proposed rule ignores high cost of rent and need for childcare
Brandi Tuck, executive director of Path Home in Portland, Oregon, said many of the families in her nonprofit’s homeless shelter and rapid rehousing programs are already working low-wage jobs where they don’t receive more than 20 or 25 hours per week.
“These requirements will just make it really bureaucratically burdensome for these families to have to jump through hoops to prove that they are working and to fight to find a job that pays them 40 hours a week because so many of our low-income jobs in this country do not,” she said.
Although the proposed rule exempts caretakers of children under 6 from the work requirement, a lack of affordable childcare would still be a barrier for parents with younger children. Tuck gave the example of a parent in Path Home’s shelter program who has lost jobs as a hotel housekeeper for bringing her elementary-age children to work during spring and summer breaks from school.
“If we’re requiring parents of young kids to work, we have to give them a resource for childcare,” she said.
Tara Ryan is the chief housing officer for the Homeless Alliance in Oklahoma City. If work requirements were in place, she said, “affordability is still going to be a problem, in my opinion,” citing Oklahoma’s minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. According to the National Low-Income Housing Association, an Oklahoma renter earning minimum wage would need to work 93 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom home at fair market rent.
“Rent costs are way higher than what a person makes when they’re working a full-time, minimum-wage job, and that, compounded with the time limits, is concerning,” Ryan said.
She said two years of assistance wouldn’t “cut it” for many people in Oklahoma.
“It’s hard to put an average time limit on individualized circumstances,” Ryan said. “Oftentimes, we’re referring to those subsidies when there are no other options for somebody and we anticipate that they’ll have a longer ongoing need for a subsidy.”
Proposed rule prompts Fair Housing concerns
Los Angeles LOMOD, which manages Section 8 project-based properties, said in a public comment on the proposed rule that allowing project-based rental assistance property owners to create work requirements or time limits “could be seen as discriminatory.” One example, LOMOD wrote, would be if the owner of a property in a majority-Black or Hispanic neighborhood put in place a work requirement, while another owner of a property in a majority-white neighborhood didn’t add a work requirement.
“This opens the owner with the requirement up for Fair Housing (Act) suits due to a decision of another owner that they have no connection to,” LOMOD said in its comment.
In another example with Fair Housing Act implications, Lundin said public housing authorities or project-based owners who operate multiple properties could add work requirements or time limits to properties mostly occupied by a protected class but not other properties.
Under the proposed rule, public housing authorities and property owners would be responsible for determining if their policies were discriminatory without additional guidance from HUD.
“They’re pushing all that responsibility onto (public housing authorities) and owners and providing no oversight on that,” Lundin said.
Some worry measures like the proposed rule deter people from asking for help
Steve Decker is the CEO of Family Promise of Puget Sound in Washington. If the rule were to go into effect and local housing authorities chose to adopt work requirements and time limits, Decker doesn’t believe the potential policy change would affect the families his organization serves. He said in Family Promise of Puget Sound’s first two years, the nonprofit has moved 185 families into permanent housing, and just five of them receive HUD subsidies.
“For those five families,” he said, “the HUD voucher makes all the difference in the world because they are not physically capable of working and maintaining their own income to stay housed. Without those HUD subsidies, they would never be housed.”
But since the proposed rule wouldn’t apply to people with disabilities, it wouldn’t affect those families.
However, as an intake hub that receives calls from chronically unhoused individuals and others without children, Family Promise has found some people are becoming afraid to ask for help because of policies like HUD’s proposed rule and the perception they’re not going to be able to get help.
“The reality is that we are still going to serve singles and families, period, regardless of any rules that get pushed down from the federal, state or local level,” Decker said. “Our greatest worry is that people don’t think they can reach out for assistance when they really do need it.”
HUD will accept public comments on the rule until May 1.
Contact Streetlight editor Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@streetlightnews.org. Follow her reporting on Bluesky or by joining our newsletter.
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