Press Release
Statement: One Thing the Democratic Presidential Hopefuls Agree On: Dramatic Expansions of Rent Assistance. But is Anyone Paying Attention?
When Joe Biden’s presidential campaign issued a housing plan this week, American politics entered a new era. All six of the top Democratic candidates have now made detailed housing proposals, and all of them would represent major expansions of federal affordable housing programs for the people with the lowest incomes.
Most striking is that five of the six candidates would greatly expand Section 8 – the program that provides low-income families with vouchers that they can use to pay part of their rent in privately owned rental housing. (Only Elizabeth Warren omits Section 8 in order to focus on producing new deeply affordable housing.)
Today, Section 8 vouchers serve only one out of four families nationally with incomes low enough to be eligible for the program (up to $48,000 for a family of three in New York City). Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and Bernie Sanders would all expand the program to end the waiting list and help every income-eligible family, potentially including an additional 488,000 households in New York City. Pete Buttigieg would expand Section 8 to include all currently income-eligible families with children, while Michael Bloomberg would include all families with incomes up to about $29,000.
It appears that massive expansions to rent assistance are now the moderate position in the Democratic Party – a position that seemed a far-out provocation when sociologist Matthew Desmond called for it three years ago in his book, Evicted.
Expanding Section 8 would bring enormous benefits to New York City, where 56 percent of low-income households in unsubsidized housing pay more than half their income in rent, and 77 percent of low-income people surveyed in Community Service Society’s Unheard Third poll said that affordable housing was a “very important” issue for presidential candidates to address.
The Biden, Klobuchar, and Sanders proposals would bring about $4 billion a year in additional benefits to New York City. Buttigieg’s would bring $1.3 billion, and Bloomberg’s $2.6 billion. Any of these would represent a significant economic stimulus as well as much-needed relief to burdened renters. Businesses that serve low-income neighborhoods would certainly see increased spending, revitalizing commercial strips around the city.
To be truly effective, rent assistance such as Section 8 must be combined with construction of new housing and robust regulation of the rental market – otherwise the increased effective demand will lead to even higher rents. Fortunately, all of the candidates’ proposals also include serious commitments to increase affordable housing construction, and several also propose to expand rent regulation.
Four of the candidates, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Sanders, and Warren, also propose significant new funds to deal with the massive backlog of deferred capital repairs in the country’s public housing stock – an issue that extends far beyond New York City.
The debates and news coverage have focused largely on other issues, but we could be at a watershed moment for the issue that is at the top of the agenda for low-income people in New York City and many other places: unaffordable rents and rising homelessness.