Families Stranded As Rental Vouchers Expire

After a four-year desperate search for a ticket out of an abusive household, Ella received one in the form a housing rental-voucher. She shed tears of relief — until she tried to find a landlord who would agree to accept it.

Ella’s story reflects a broader challenge for a growing number of low-income tenants lucky enough to make it through long waitlists to obtain a federal Section 8 rental subsidy: Translating the subsidy into an actual home, because of landlords reluctant to participate in the program in a tight housing market. 

The number of vouchers that expire before they can be used has shot up over the past two years.

Ella (whose name has been changed to protect her safety) applied to every Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program she could find in secret, planning to leave the home she shares with a verbally abusive partner in a suburb of New Haven. She submitted applications to every open waitlist in Connecticut, along with out-of-state waitlists as far away as Florida.

After about four years, Ella received a voucher from Hartford Housing Authority, which would allow her to look for apartments in New Haven and Fairfield, near her grandchildren.

“I sat in the room and just cried like a 2‑year-old, because I was so excited that I was finally gonna be able to breathe again,” she said. ​“Do what I want to do and not have to worry about stupid verbal things, just be able to just breathe.” 

But months of apartment applications have led her nowhere. After two extended deadlines, Ella has until the end of April to find a place — or become one of the growing number of people to lose their vouchers amid rising rents and a shortage of affordable housing.

Federal Section 8 rental-subsidy vouchers are allocated by local housing authorities. Many of the vouchers allow tenants to ​“port” their voucher to different towns.

In New Haven, voucher recipients initially receive 60 days to find a new home and can request two 30-day extensions. The number of voucher recipients who could not make those deadlines has spiked since the start of the pandemic.

In 2021, 382 of New Haven’s 5,368 Section 8 vouchers expired before they could be used — meaning that tenants were unable to find an apartment within the 60 to 120-day period. 

That’s more than twice the amount of vouchers that expired in 2019 — 155 — a number that reflects both existing Section 8 tenants seeking to move and tenants new to the Housing Choice Voucher system who could not find a home in time. (In 2020, New Haven did not expire vouchers, due to the pandemic.)

When tenants new to the voucher program are unable to find an apartment in time, the voucher transfers to someone else on the waitlist.

Ella is financially dependent on her abusive partner; she has no income other than $1,100 each month from Social Security disability. The Section 8 approval gave her hope that she could leave her 13-year relationship and start over in a one-bedroom of her own. She’s hoping to move to New Haven or Fairfield, to be near her grandchildren. 

The prospect of moving out is both urgent and frightening for Ella. ​“When I leave, I have to just grab what I can and go, because I just don’t want the fight,” Ella said. The emotional toll of her relationship worsened when, a few weeks ago, her only child died in a car crash; her grief has been so heavy she can hardly get out of bed.

But it hasn’t been easy to find apartments that would meet Ella’s voucher rent cap: $1,250 for a one-bedroom, if utilities are included. According to the rental website Zumper, one-bedroom apartments in New Haven are now averaging $1,800 per month, a 16 percent increase from last year and a 6 percent increase from last month.

Successfully applying to an apartment is even more challenging. Ella estimates that she has emailed or called about 100 apartments and formally applied for about 25 over the past handful of months on websites like Zillow, Facebook Marketplace, and Hotpads.

Some landlords have explicitly told her they don’t accept Section 8 tenants, she said, even though discrimination against Section 8 is illegal under the state’s fair housing laws.

Many of the housing applications have required $25, $50, even $75 as a processing fee — which Section 8 did not cover.

Those applications have, so far, led Ella nowhere. ​“That’s just money that I’m throwing in the garbage,” she said. 

Section 8 also does not cover security deposits. Ella said a Guilford-based domestic violence organization has offered to cover the deposit, but some prospective landlords refused to wait the week it would take the organization to process the request. 

She said a coordinated system is needed to help domestic violence survivors leave dangerous relationships — including victims of emotional abuse, who do not appear to qualify for the emergency housing vouchers for which victims of physical violence can apply.

Roads Lead To Mandy

The fact that so much of the area’s affordable housing is concentrated in a few landlord companies makes the process even harder, Ella said. She said she has found that a majority of the apartments she looks at are affiliated with Mandy Management, one of New Haven’s largest landlords that largely rents to Section 8 tenants. But Ella has already applied to rent with Mandy: ​“They’re like, Oh, you have to fill out an application fee. I’m like, I already did.”

When it comes to Section 8 in the New Haven area, many roads seem to lead to Mandy Management.

Jasmine Wells finally moved into a Mandy Management apartment with her children on April 1, after avoiding renting from the company for as long as possible. She’d heard that the megalandlord was a ​“slumlord” notorious for housing code violations.

Wells, who has four children, received a four-bedroom Section 8 voucher just over a year ago. At the time, the voucher allowed her to move to a single-family house with gray vinyl siding on Willis Street. But Wells didn’t like the location or the landlord. In the months before her yearlong lease came to an end in February 2022, she tried to find another four-bedroom that would accept her Section 8 voucher. 

With the help of a realtor, Wells had reached out to ​“hundreds” of apartments, she said.

“I had emails, text messages, Facebook inboxes, and I was willing to port out [transfer the voucher] to West Haven, Hamden, Derby — anything to just move.”

Four-bedroom apartments are relatively hard to come by in New Haven, let alone a four-bedroom that would meet Section 8’s rent cap requirements. While rents have been rising at an accelerated pace in New Haven, tenants say that Section 8 rent calculations haven’t kept up with that reality. 

Like Ella, Wells said she frequently got illegal rejections from apartments when the landlord learned about her voucher. 

“A lot of people straight up tell you, ​‘We don’t accept Section 8,’” she said. One East Haven landlord, for instance, emailed Wells in late November, 2021: ​“Just to let you know the house is not section 8 certified and it is stated on the listing.” 

Coreen Toussaint, the vice president of the Housing Choice Voucher program at Elm City Communities/the Housing Authority of New Haven, which distributes Section 8 vouchers for the city, wrote in an email that responses like that should be reported for a Fair Housing violation. ​“If the unit was not inspected I am not certain how the owner can know that it wouldn’t pass,” Toussaint wrote. (The Connecticut Fair Housing Center investigates housing discrimination complaints, which can be reported here.)

Wells couldn’t find an apartment in time for her lease to end. She stayed at the Willis Street house for another month, facing a possible eviction. Finally, she found an apartment in New Haven with Mandy Management. ​“I was forced to move there, because no one would take what Section 8 was paying, and Section 8 made it very clear that they have limitations on what they would pay for.”

DuBois-Walton: Market's Squeezed

Housing authority Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton attributed the difficulty in finding housing with a Section 8 voucher to a ​“tight rental market.”

In some ways, DuBois-Walton said, the heightened difficulty of finding a home right now stems from a long-term paucity in housing supply. ​“The construction of housing has not kept pace with where it should be,” she said. ​“Even where you see a ton of building happening right now, it’s got to compensate for the years in which there was no growth in the housing market.”

The pandemic has also squeezed the rental market, DuBois-Walton said.

With the economic strain on so many households, ​“folks who maybe would have stepped into a higher-income unit aren’t” doing so — meaning that the demand for lower-rent units has probably increased, she said.

The typical flow of tenants in and out of apartments may have also been impacted by the pandemic, as fewer people decided to move and many evictions were stalled or prevented, she added. 

To DuBois-Walton, the rising number of vouchers that could not be used in time reflects not only a challenging market, but a significant number of people looking to leave their current housing situations.

Many Section 8 recipients are likely spending months looking for a new apartment because they are unable to use their voucher where they currently live. In many cases, DuBois-Walton surmised, voucher recipients’ current living situations might not be able to pass the required inspection for all Section 8 apartments. The number of unused vouchers ​“says something pretty strong about the quality of housing” in New Haven, DuBois-Walton said.

A Landlord's View

Carol Horsford, the founder of Farnam Real Estate, one of the city’s larger property management firms, offered another explanation for the difficulty that Section 8 tenants have faced finding a place to live: a labor and supply chain shortage that has slowed down the process of turning over an apartment.

Another of the city’s largest landlords that rents to many Section 8 tenants, Ocean Management, recently contracted with Farnam to manage their properties.

“We’re the Section 8 experts,” Horsford said. She has dedicated an entire room of Farnam’s Whitney Avenue headquarters to managing housing voucher programs like Section 8. 

As of last week, Horsford said, Ocean-owned properties alone included 67 vacant apartments that were waiting for new tenants. The company is far from short on applicants; Horsford said she gets 80 to 100 ​“leads” on tenants each day, which can range from an email via a third-party website to a filled-out application. 

The holdup, according to Horsford and Farnam Maintenance Director Jean Marcos Guerrero, lies partly in recruiting experienced employees to perform the necessary fixes in apartments with changing tenants. 

And in some cases, the supplies and appliances needed to pass a Section 8 inspection aren’t available.

“You can’t get refrigerators, you can’t get dishwashers, you can’t get washer-dryers, and you can’t move these people in until they got that stuff,” Horsford said. Lately, she has been advising the property owners she works with to purchase as many appliances as possible in advance. An apartment that might typically take two weeks to turn over is now taking four to six weeks, she said.

In one recent case, Horsford said, a family with a Section 8 voucher was unable to move into a Farnam apartment because inspectors found something wrong with the gas meter. That prospective tenant ended up needing to sleep in a warming center for a few nights with her kids until the part could be fixed. Horsford described her team working ​“around the clock” to find the part.

“It’s all the nitty gritty, tiny little things that can go wrong in an apartment that need to be perfect for a Section 8 move-in,” she said. ​“Of course, if a landlord has an empty apartment, they want to rent it out.”

For landlords, according to Horsford, the process of filling out paperwork for Section 8 tenants is arduous and time-intensive. The landlord has to physically deliver the paperwork to various city offices at various points in the process. Horsford said that for each new Section 8 tenant, she can spend four to six hours of focused work filling out the forms and coordinating their delivery to various city departments.

“It needs a real technology overhaul,” Horsford said.

The 60-day notice that Section 8 tenants are required to provide Elm City Communities before vacating their current apartment can also provide hiccups for their future landlords, Horsford said. The new landlord might need to hold the apartment vacant for that 60-day period without receiving income from Section 8.

Waitlists Grow Longer

Meanwhile, waitlists to obtain a Section 8 voucher have grown longer. New Haven has over 20,000 families on the Housing Choice Voucher waitlist, which reopened to new applicants in early 2021, according to DuBois-Walton. This means that it can take years to obtain a voucher after applying.

“Somebody who’s on the top of our list now probably applied 5 years ago,” said DuBois-Walton.

DuBois-Walton recommended that those still waiting for a voucher apply to as many Section 8 departments as possible. Tenants can call 2 – 1‑1 to register with the state’s resource directory system, which can alert them whenever a Section 8 waitlist opens up.

DuBois-Walton also urged applicants to update their application if their contact information or address changes.

Tenants can also weigh in on potential policy solutions. The state legislature is currently weighing three bills that could affect affordable housing construction across the state: H.B. No. 5429, An Act Concerning Transit-Oriented Development; H.B. No. 5209, An Act Concerning Housing Authority Jurisdiction; and H.B. No. 5204, An Act Concerning A Needs Assessment And Fair Share Plans For Municipalities To Increase Affordable Housing.

On a national scale, some housing advocates have argued for a universal voucher system that would make Section 8 available to every income-eligible household.

Both Wells and Ella said they wish Section 8 rent caps, which are negotiated by municipal housing authorities, would rise to accommodate the recent surge in housing costs across the city. And they both argued that cities should provide more support for Section 8 recipients throughout the apartment search.

Ella has just a handful of weeks to find an apartment.

“If I don’t, then I’m stuck in this situation,” she said. ​“Who knows when the next town or the next state is going to [get my name] put up on that list. Who knows?”