Housing Authorities Spend 1,000+ FTE on Screening and Evictions for Criminal Activity.

Tomorrow's Federal Register will have a HUD notice of an information collection that includes the burden hours for PHA's for the screening and eviction of applicants and tenants for criminal activity.  [ Look for "Screening and Eviction for Drug Abuse and Other Criminal Activity"].

The existing reported public housing burden hours are expanded to include the voucher burden hours. The reported activity and burden hours are explained by HUD as: 

The information and collection requirements consist of PHA screening requirements to obtain criminal conviction records from law enforcement agencies to prevent admission of criminals into the public housing and Section 8 programs and to assist in lease enforcement and eviction of those individuals in the public housing and Section 8 programs who engage in criminal activity.

The Excel file embedded below and HERE shows MY calculations that indicate that PHA's : 

• Conduct more than 500,000 screenings for criminal activity and related eviction actions a year. 
• It takes an average of 4.24 hours for each action.
• 2+ Million hours/ 1,019 FTE's are spent each year on this activity. 
• IF FTE cost is $50,000 per year, annual costs for these screenings and evictions exceeds $50 million.

Note that these cost burden estimates do NOT include cost burdens for similar activity conducted for HUD project based Section 8, HUD 202 or HUD 811 programs. 

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.