Low-income housing authorities scored based on self-assessment; renters may disagree

It can be difficult for low-income people to find decent subsidized housing through the Section 8 voucher program, but the Department of Housing and Urban Development doesn't know much about it. That's because HUD allows local housing authorities to grade themselves on their success. Over the past five years, at least 90 percent of local housing authorities gave themselves perfect scores in helping people find homes, despite evidence that many are not doing such a great job, The Connecticut Mirror's Jacqueline Rabe Thomas reports for ProPublica's Local Reporting Network.

Through the Section 8 voucher program, which operates in urban and rural areas, HUD pays a portion of the rent for qualified low-income people. But many landlords refuse to rent to those with Section 8 vouchers (though it's illegal), and in many places there isn't much affordable or rentable housing around in the first place, especially in rural areas. On top of that, some local housing authorities don't have enough case workers to shepherd voucher recipients through an often lengthy process, Thomas reports.

In the late 1990s, when HUD was dealing with a reduced staff, the department largely began relying on self-assessments to score local housing authorities. In late 2019, HUD's Office of Inspector General noted that relying on self-assessments was one of the agency's top challenges, Thomas reports.

Rising rents in rural areas make it more and more difficult for people to find affordable housing. Nearly a quarter of the nation's most rural counties have seen a big increase in the past decade in the number of households that spend at least half their income on housing, according to 2019 data.