First Take: I See Little Clear Benefit to Oregon From HUD FY 2011 Transforming Rental Assistance Proposal.

I have begun to look at some of the HUD FY 2011 budget documents.

One of the signature provisions is an effort to voluntarily convert up to 300,000 PHA and other project based units to a a new form of rental assistance with long term contracts and a new portability provision for renters.(Look at Transforming Rental Assistance Congressional Justification document from HUD HERE for more details).

However within that 300,000 total units 150,000 units would NOT be subject to competition for funding. Those units would be allocated by HUD and ONLY PHA's who have public housing units and NO vouchers would be eligible to receive these units an allocation. (The remaining 150,000 units would all be subject to a competition and would consist of PHA owned Section 8 properties [130,000 units], and 20,000 mod rehab units).

Since most western PHA's had the greatest population growth AFTER the scaling back of public housing programs and most therefore MUST use Section 8 vouchers, it occurred to me that MOST of the eligible PHA's for this special set aside allocation would be in the East.

So, I did a table HERE. It confirms that states EAST of the Mississippi would benefit most from the allocation/set aside of 150,000 PHA units. Some observations from the data in the table:

• 67% of the eigible units Are in states with only 30% of the US Population.
• The West has 41% of the US Population, but only 29% of the Eligible PHA Units.
• At MOST Oregon would receive an allocation of only 108 units for only ONE housing authority in North Bend.(All other Oregon housing authorities have vouchers and thus would not qualify for the allocation).
  
• California with a population of nearly 37 million would at most receive 740 allocated units. GUAM would actually be eligible for an allocation of MORE units (750). OUCH!
  

Bottom line, unless something else emerges, I see little clear benefit to Oregon from the non competitive PHA allocation rental assistance transformation proposal in the HUD FY 2011 budget.

The remaining project based and mod rehab conversion provisions appear to offer MODEST benefit at best, IF owners can successfully compete for conversion funding. The PHA owned Section 8 property competition MAY help some Oregon PHA's, however, the program has a negative feature that will require PHA's to give up contract administration for these projects, reducing their control and administrative fee income. Mod rehab provisions may be attractive if they help increase rents by using a better expense driven rent setting process.

Perhaps the one additional component of the planned HUD rental transformation that Oregon PHA's might be able to compete successfully for is a separate $50 million pot to help pay admin costs of regionalization of voucher programs. It will be interesting to see the scope of coop agreements that would qualify for this competitive funding.

BTW: I developed my PHA counts by using a HUD database of PHA's and voucher and public housing counts that was uploaded by HUD to the data.gov website. HUD's zipped Excel file with that PHA data is available HERE.

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.