Casey J. Dawkins

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The Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act (QHWRA) of 1998 overhauled the nation’s approach to managing publicly owned housing and consolidated the Section 8 certificate and voucher programs into a new streamlined Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program. With the repeal of federal preferences for new admissions before QHWRA and the anticipated poverty deconcentration within public housing anticipated to occur following the adoption of QHWRA, new federal income-targeting requirements were established as part of QHWRA to ensure that the nation’s neediest families would continue to receive first priority in the allocation of tenant-based housing assistance. These requirements stated that no less than 75 percent of any local public housing agency’s (PHA’s) new admissions to the HCV Program in any given fiscal year must be families with extremely low incomes (ELIs) (income at or below 30 percent of the area median income).

This research examines data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) administrative records for all households receiving housing choice vouchers from 1997 through 2005 to determine if the income-targeting goals of QHWRA are being met at the national and local levels. Analyses of the characteristics of new admissions between 1997 and 2005 reveal several important trends. First, while most PHAs were in compliance with the income-targeting goals of QHWRA during the 1997-through-2005 period, nearly 40 percent of PHAs still are not in compliance with the goals of QHWRA. On average, larger PHAs are more likely to comply with the goals of QHWRA than are small PHAs, although rural PHAs have made substantial strides in meeting the goals of QHWRA. Since the enactment of QHWRA, there has been a trend toward increased HCV participation among Hispanic households and a general trend toward smaller family sizes, older household heads, and fewer ELI female-headed households with children.