DIANE YENTEL: I think what’s especially appalling about these proposed rent increases is that they target the very poorest people, including seniors and people with disabilities who are already often living on fixed incomes and are at significant risk of homelessness. The proposal would increase rents for households with high medical or high childcare expenses by eliminating income deductions for those expenses. So the greatest burdens would be felt by seniors, people with disabilities and families with young kids who who tend to have those high costs. So I think it’s appalling and it’s important to recognize that these attempts to raise those rents on the most vulnerable people are really part of a larger assault by this administration on the entire social safety net. And I think that this administration’s proposals to take away what are already very limited benefits for the healthcare, for food and for housing from struggling families just months after giving massive tax cuts to wealthy people and corporations is really an astonishing level of hypocrisy.
BETWEEN THE LINES: I wondered if you would address Ben Carson’s statement where he talked about the justification for these rent increases, trying to get away from a system that he claims has introduced perverse incentives, discouraging employment by many public housing tenants. How do you respond to the idea that somehow the federal subsidies coming from HUD are discouraging people from being gainfully employed and earning larger incomes?
DIANE YENTEL: First of all, that kind of rhetoric is really unfortunate because it’s a purposeful attempt to kind of separate out what some might consider the deserving poor from the undeserving poor. Right? And when we look at who is receiving housing assistance today, the vast majority of them are seniors. They’re people with disabilities; they are caretakers for people with disabilities or very young kids or they are working, but they’re working very low wage jobs. The kind of jobs where you can’t pay the kind of rents that are out there today and the kind of jobs where often it can be difficult to kind of cobble together enough hours in a week or in a month to make ends meet.
So, creating arbitrary work requirements where you’re setting a kind of arbitrary bar for the number of hours that needs to be worked in a week. If that family isn’t able to get that number of hours in that week or in that month and they fall below that bar, are we really proposing that that family should be evicted from their housing? I mean, who is that helping? Especially in the midst of the type of housing crisis that we’re in today.
DIANE YENTEL: There are programs within Secretary Carson’s purview within the Department of Housing and Urban Development that could work to help people increase their earnings – programs like something called the family self-sufficiency program. There’s another program called the Section 3 program and that requires local communities to use HUD dollars that create jobs to first offer those jobs to low-income tenants or other low-income residents in the community. That’s a regulation that’s really very loosely overseen. Secretary Carson could do much more on that. He could seek funding to take the family self-sufficiency program to scale, but he’s not doing any of those things. Instead, he’s proposing policies really that are punishing poor people for being poor.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Diane, I wanted to ask you about the impact of this increased rent and the work requirements. What’s the liable to be the outcome for some of these poorer families that will be out the other end of this policy if it goes through Congress?
DIANE YENTEL: Well, so here’s something that we’ve known about housing costs for decades and have had general agreement among housing experts and policy makers, and that is that if you’re paying more than 30 percent of your income towards rent each month, you’re considered to be cost burdened. It means that you have limited income left over for all of life’s other necessities. When you’re low income to begin with and you’re paying more than 30 percent of your very limited income, you have even less left for things like healthy food or medicine to stay healthy or saving for the future, saving for college or saving for retirement. So what HUD is actually proposing to do here is to increase the rent burdens on some of the lowest income people across the country. For most residents of HUD’s major rental programs, it would mean increasing their rent from 30 percent of their income up to 35 percent of their income and from 30 percent of adjusted where they make some adjustments for those high medical costs or childcare costs to 35 percent of gross without any deductions at all.
That’s a really significant (increase) for very low income people and for the very lowest, the poorest and the most vulnerable households that are in HUD homes today. They typically pay what’s called a minimum rent, which could be up to about $50 a month for them. HUD is proposing a mandatory minimum rent of a $150. So tripling the rent of literally the poorest and most vulnerable households. So any of this will mean that people will be at a much higher risk of not being able to pay the rent, facing possible eviction and possible homelessness.
