Emergency Housing Voucher Costs: $3,900 In Special Fees Increase Average Oregon EHV Costs by 42%.

HUD has recently launched a dashboard for the Emergency Voucher Program, a new subset of the voucher program. The focus for the EHV is:

To assist individuals and families who are homeless, at-risk of homelessness, fleeing, or attempting to flee, domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, stalking, or human trafficking, or were recently homeless or have a high risk of housing instability. 

 [HUD's EHV landing page HERE has links to other details about the program; one feature of this tenant based only program is the authority of the HUD Secretary to publish guidance via Notice, avoiding the time delays that might result from regulatory publication requirements. 

HUD was allocated $5 billion in funds from the American Rescue Plan for EHV incremental vouchers for the period ending September 30, 2030.  

In the Build Back Better act that has yet to be approved by the Senate there is an additional $22+ billion for incremental and renewal assistance that could include some incremental or renewal vouchers for the same populations served by the Emergency Voucher Program.   

[HUD's dashboard for the regular voucher program is HERE].

The EHV dashboard has multiple screens that highlight different aspects of the program, allowing users to drill down to state and local PHA levels. 

• Page 2 currently shows that Oregon PHA's have leased up 148 EHV's, slightly more than 9% of the available vouchers. (Nationally, that percentage is 6%)
• Page 3 currently shows that 432 Oregon households with a EHV are looking for a unit. (That's 27% of EHV's, more than the national 21% rate).
• Page 5  shows that Oregon has the 9th highest statewide allocation (1,246) of EHV's.

In this post I am going to focus on Page 4, which breaks out the budget authority for these vouchers. For Oregon those average dollar costs and [% costs of budget authority]. 

1. Housing Assistance Payment $8,190 [62%]
2. On going admin fee (the same as all vouchers) $1,124 [8.5%]
3. Special Preliminary fee $400 [3%]
4. Special Service fee $3,500 [26.5%]
5. Total voucher cost averages $13,215

For Oregon, the pie chart pasted here shows the share of budget authority for each cost category. 

That chart shows that Oregon EHV rent payments [HAP] are only 62% of the total budget authority: 

While HUD does NOT make it easy to extract screen data from the EHV dashboard, I was able to extract average dollar costs for:

• The US, 
• For Oregon, 
• Within Oregon, for Home Forward, 
• Within Oregon the rest of Oregon Home Forward

The table below shows the detailed results for these additional geographic areas. 

Observations:

Total budget authority for these vouchers :

• US $16,361 
• Oregon $13,215
• Home Forward $15,090
• Rest of Oregon PHA's with EHV allocations $12,407

Percentage increase in average per unit budget authority because of $3,900 in special fees [Placement and Services]:

• US 31%
• Oregon 42%
• Home Forward 35% 
• Rest of PHA's with vouchers in Oregon 46%

In other words, absent the $3,900 in special fees the same Oregon budget authority could serve 664 more households (a total of 2,244 households).  [1.42%* 1,582=2,244]. 

Using the 31% US increase because of special fees, 21,867 more households could be helped with the same $1.1 billion in budget authority. 

Note: HUD has indicated that it may on request increase budget authority for HAP to reflect actual PHA experience so total per unit costs could increase. This would decrease the share of total budget authority from special fees, while increasing total budget authority and average costs per voucher. 

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.