Chapter 1

Since the early 1990s, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has submitted regular formal reports to Congress on worst case needs for rental housing assistance. These reports have drawn on data collected by the Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, in the American Housing Survey (AHS) and in the decennial censuses. The 1996 report, Rental Housing Assistance at a Crossroads, for the first time also included information from HUD administrative data about how well current housing assistance programs are serving families and individuals that otherwise would have worst case needs.¹

Terms and Sources

This report uses the terms "acute housing needs" and "worst case needs" interchangeably to refer to households that:

• Are renters.

• Do not receive Federal housing assistance.

• Have incomes below 50 percent of median family income in their area, as established by HUD.

• Pay more than one-half of their income for rent and utilities or live in severely substandard housing -- until recently, households on waiting lists with either of these characteristics received preference for rental assistance programs.²

The basic source of information for analyzing the U.S. housing stock and the housing needs of U.S. households is the American Housing Survey. AHS is conducted for HUD by the Bureau of the Census, which completes about 45,000 interviews of occupied households in a biennial national sample of housing units. Smaller samples of units in 47 large metropolitan areas are surveyed on 4- to 6-year cycles.

HUD's first formal report to Congress on worst case needs in 1991 was based on 1989's AHS. The second report in 1992 continued to use 1989 AHS data for the Nation, augmented with information on worst case needs from the metropolitan surveys. In 1994, HUD based its report on data from the 1991 AHS and the 1990 Decennial Census.

The 1996 report was based on data from the 1993 AHS and, for the first time, included administrative data on the characteristics of households participating in the public housing and Section 8 programs. The 1996 report also included analyses of data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) to better understand the housing needs of persons with disabilities and their participation in HUD programs. Finally, that report reanalyzed and refined earlier AHS data to more reliably track growth in the number of households with worst case housing needs between 1978 and 1993.³

1. In 1990, the Senate Appropriations Committee directed HUD to "resume the annual compilation of a worst case housing needs survey of the United States." HUD had reported worst case housing needs to Congress during the 1980s on an informal basis, following a request from the Chair of the HUD Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

2. Although "substandard" housing should include homelessness, the homeless are omitted from this report's counts of worst case needs because the AHS surveys and counts only persons in housing units. For a history of the Federal preferences, see exhibit 19, "History of the Federal Preference System."

3. HUD's previous reports to Congress are Priority Problems and "Worst Case" Needs in 1989 (June 1991, HUD­1314­PDR), The Location of Worst Case Needs in the Late 1980s (December 1992, HUD­1387­PDR), Worst Case Needs for Housing Assistance in the United States in 1990 and 1991 (June 1994, HUD­1481­PDR), and Rental Housing Assistance at a Crossroads: A Report to Congress on Worst Case Housing Needs (March 1996). Both the June 1994 and March 1996 reports are available online at http://www.huduser.org under the Publications heading.