Home Wreckers

Even if local housing authorities find a way to scrape by without immediately making drastic cuts, the future for the voucher program is bleak. The Bush administration has proposed a major overhaul of the program in its 2005 budget. If the budget is enacted, housing authorities would receive block grants largely uninhibited by federal restrictions. The purported intention is to liberate local agencies from bureaucratic meddling and allow them to distribute the funds more efficiently.

In reality, the Bush proposal is simply a massive cutback in services masquerading as reform. According to an analysis of the plan prepared by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, the changes would result in $1.6 billion in cuts in 2005 and $4.6 billion by 2009. This would mean that some 600,000 people nationwide who currently receive housing subsidies would have to be pared from the rolls over the next five years. In Minneapolis alone, according to the analysis, some 1,400 people would lose their vouchers--roughly 30 percent of those currently receiving assistance.

Affordable housing advocates fear that the budget proposal, coupled with the confusing directives from HUD, is an attempt to undermine the housing authorities and ultimately gut the program. "If you force them to be incompetent and inept and you don't give them enough money to run the program, then you have good justification for taking away the program," argues Melissa Rudnick, a tenant organizer with the nonprofit advocacy group HOME Line. "We still think that's part of the motivation for what's going on here."

The need for housing assistance already far outstrips the number of vouchers available. The Minneapolis Public Housing Authority opened its waiting list for assistance in May of last year and received 8,000 inquiries in three days. In Dakota County there are 1,600 people currently on the waiting list--and no names have been added for two years.

Lowanda Harvey waited five years to land a voucher. But even with a housing subsidy, the St. Paul resident says it's difficult to find a decent place to live. "What can I say? I'm a black woman with five kids," Harvey notes. She believes that landlords wrongly fear that her family will tear up the property or sell drugs. "These are the things that these landlords assume when they look at me."

Even so, Harvey doesn't know what she would do without the housing voucher. Section 8, she says, is "a privilege and a blessing."

Like Finley and scores of others, Harvey's unsettled, and a bit bewildered, by the ongoing budgetary battles. "I'm trying to understand what's going to happen," Harvey says. "You're just on the outside looking in."