Public housing has surprisingly high eviction rates

MassLive analyzed a recent report by Eviction Lab, a group that analyzes eviction and housing issues nationwide.Many think that once a household gets into public housing, they can stay there for life. That's not true, as if the household income increases, it may become ineligible for the apartment.Many also think that there's no way to evict a family from public housing. Equally untrue, and while public and private landlords have roughly the same eviction rates overall, public housing has a higher rate of repeated eviction filings (not necessarily resulting in actual eviction) against the same household at the same address.Most of the eviction filings result from non-payment of rent, rather than lease infractions. Public housing rent (which includes heat and water) is capped at 30% of the household's income and the Eviction Lab article states that the average household income nationally for a family (it doesn't say the size of the family) in public housing is $16,398. Thirty percent of that is $4,914 a year or $410 per month.The report states that housing agencies that operate public housing are evaluated on their rent collection, which leads to higher eviction rates.In Massachusetts, according to the report, 35% of public housing residents who received eviction notices received them repeatedly as opposed to 25% of private landlords. Malden and Lowell had the highest repeat eviction rates in the state with Springfield, Lawrence, Worcester and Boston filing repeat eviction notices at rates below the state's average. 

Housing Authorities Combine Financing to Build More Public Housing

Many public housing projects were in bad shape in the late 20th century. Crime was often rampant and the dense concentration of very poor people brought many social ills. Many municipalities felt they couldn't absorb more housing projects and in 1999, a federal law, the Faircloth Amendment, went into effect capping the number of public housing units in any city or town at the number of units that existed that year.For a deep dive into affordable housing vocabulary, see our previous blog here. Affordable housing continued to be built, as the Faircloth Amendment covered public housing projects - all-affordable developments that are operated by local housing authorities and that continue to sometimes have a bad reputation. These are technically known as Section 9 housing. The funding for construction of these units comes exclusively from the Federal Government (HUD) and per-unit funding is low, which is why they are shoddily constructed and frequently fall into disrepair.Section 8 housing, however, is more flexible and allows developers building such units to access bank financing (not exclusively HUD funding) for capital projects.Activists have tried to repeal the Faircloth Amendment and unit cap to no avail, but as the years have gone on, the number of very-low-income units has decreased due to demolition and redevelopment into market-rate units. Federally financed affordable units must be guaranteed to be income-restricted for 30 years, but after that they can come out of the affordable pool.So even though cities could have built more public housing to get back up to 1999 levels, the available funding from HUD (the required, exclusive funding source) was scarce and wasn't enough to build really good housing.In 2017, HUD itself created a workaround to allow Section 9 units to be converted into Section 8 units, which don't have a cap in numbers and which can be built using private financing, and which reimburse housing authorities at a higher rate.For an excellent and detailed overview of how the Section 9 to Section 8 process works, see this 2017 article from the Fulton County (NY) Daily Gazette. Cambridge and Holyoke's housing authorities are two communities that are taking this route to put together multi-faceted financing using the Section 8 vouchers to build more units. Holyoke is now 189 units under the 1999 level and is about to build 30 units to get closer to that upper limit, after adding 9 public units to an innovative development in South Holyoke that contains public (Section 8) units, 3 moderate-income units (up to 50% of the AMI) and that will contain 19 shared-equity townhouses, where the resident owns the building and the housing authority owns the land and the house is preserved as permanently affordable.Cambridge is about 1,500 units shy of the 1999 cap on public housing. Unlike Holyoke, residential real estate is in high demand in Cambridge, so more units that reached their 30 year affordability cap were turned into market rate units.Cambridge is currently in the process of building 124 new public housing units using the Section 8 conversion process. Cambridge's housing authority is also talking to neighboring Medford to build units there, according to the Boston Globe. Local housing authorities are allowed to operate anywhere in Massachusetts, so if the Cambridge-Medford deal goes through, Cambridge public housing tenants may live in Medford, where construction costs are lower.Boston is 2,900 units below the 1999 cap, but has not yet devised a plan to rebuild the units, per the Globe article.