Voucher program is supposed to help poor families rent a home. Nearly half the time, it fails.

By the time Kimberly Loper, 28, got the news that she would receive a Section 8 voucher – a coveted federal rental subsidy for low-income families – she had been on the waitlist for three years.

Now, she was homeless with her partner and their two sons, a 7-year-old and a baby whose first address was a shelter in Brooklyn, New York. The voucher was their golden ticket. It promised stability after years of scraping by.

But there was a catch: In two months, if they could not find a home, the voucher would expire and go to the next name on the list. In June, after months of applications and rejections, they lost it.

“When we finally got the voucher, it was a celebration,” Loper said. “We didn’t know how hard the process was of getting an apartment to accept you. I just feel really stuck, like I’m never going to get out of here.”

Loper is among thousands of people across the country who are losing their federal housing vouchers before they can ever use them. Until recently, the true scale of this problem was unknown. But a groundbreaking analysis by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University found that in 2022, nearly half of households awarded housing vouchers were unable to use them.

The problem has been rapidly worsening. From 2018 to 2022, the share of households unable to use their voucher increased from 35% to 45%.

“It’s a dire situation,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, director of the Furman Center and one of the authors of the study. “That after winning the lottery, essentially, and getting this voucher, many of them may be searching and searching and unsuccessful. That is tragic for that individual family.”

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees the voucher program, does not require that the thousands of local authorities around the country who administer the vouchers track or improve these high failure rates.

Instead, the federal government incentivizes housing agencies – above all – to use all their funding. So, like airlines overselling seats to ensure a full flight, the agencies often hand out more vouchers than they have funding for to compensate for the many families they know won't be able to use them.

Douglas Rice, a program advisor in HUD’s Office of Public Housing Voucher Programs, said HUD sees these high failure rates as a “reason for great concern” and acknowledged that local housing agencies have “no direct incentive” to improve them. But he said HUD has made some recent changes to help address the problem, such as increasing the cash value of the vouchers to better keep pace with soaring rents.

“We’re very focused on this,” Rice said. “To be honest, the market has been very bad in recent years. But success rates being lower than we’d like them to be is really a longer-standing problem in the voucher program. This is an issue that has been around for a while, and it’s past time for HUD and housing authorities to figure out how to address it.”

USA TODAY spoke with members of six households whose vouchers expired or were revoked before they could find a home. They were left in desperate situations ? in homeless shelters, public parks, budget motel rooms, couch surfing or in overcrowded homes ? made all the more difficult by the emotional whiplash of winning a voucher only to have it taken away.

In New York City, Samantha Brown, 35, got a voucher after leaving an abusive relationship. She was studying to be a nurse, but ever since her voucher expired in December, she has been sleeping on relatives’ couches or on a public park bench, her future on hold.

In Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, Jessica Hicks, 41, lost her voucher in 2015 and has been homeless ever since. The experience was too devastating for her to apply a second time.

“I can’t emotionally go through that again,” she said. “What’s the point of getting a voucher if I can’t find a place to live?”

In New York City, Tiffany De Hoyos, 39, was crowded into a two-bedroom apartment with her mother, father and three daughters when she was awarded a voucher. It was her chance to give her children their own space. But in May, after months of searching, the voucher expired.

“To wait two years to get it, and then get it and lose it, it’s a disappointment,” De Hoyos said. “If you’re given this voucher, where are the resources? Where are the landlords? Where are the properties?”

Why are Section 8 vouchers so hard to use?

The voucher program emerged in the 1970s, when the government was demolishing public housing complexes that had suffered decades of neglect and mismanagement under its watch.

In their place, it offered a new vision for government-subsidized housing: the tenant-based housing voucher.

Instead of living in a public housing project, a tenant could now use a voucher to rent a modest home from a private landlord anywhere in their city. Their rent would be capped at about 30% of their income, and the federal government would cover the rest, up to a local limit. The program came to be seen as a tool for reversing the harms of concentrated poverty and racial segregation by giving poor families more choice in where they lived.

It has since become the largest rental assistance program in the United States and is a lifeline for more than 2.3 million households. But shifting public housing into the private market has come with its own set of problems.

For one, the program relies on private landlords to rent to people with vouchers, which many simply refuse to do.

Some of that can be attributed to outright discrimination, but landlords also say they are put off by the program’s red tape, like the quality inspection required before a tenant can move in – a delay that can cost them in lost rent while their unit sits empty.

On the other end, tenants, many of them elderly, disabled or homeless, are usually left to search for a home with no help.

After years of languishing on a waitlist to get the voucher, they can have as few as 60 days before it expires, a time frame in which less than a third of tenants are successful, according to the Furman Center’s analysis.

Vouchers do not come with money to pay for security deposits, broker fees, application fees or other move-in costs. On GoFundMe, the online fund-raising platform, dozens of families with vouchers are asking for money because they found a home but can’t afford the security deposit.

“This notion that I can just give an individual a voucher and they can go navigate the rental market and negotiate with a landlord and get a unit – what we’re seeing is that’s just not the case en masse anymore,” said Mandy Chapman Semple, a national homelessness consultant.

Aside from three previous smaller-scale studies, the most recent in 2001, nobody researched voucher success rates until the Furman Center’s recent analysis. The researchers examined data from more than 1,300 public housing authorities for the years 2018 and 2019, and more recently released a national-level estimate for the year 2022.

They found that in every corner of the country, from rural Nevada to small-town North Carolina to the nation’s largest cities, people are losing their vouchers before they can use them at staggering rates.

In 2022 alone, they identified about 90,000 households that received vouchers but were unable to use them. Because their research included only about three-quarters of the vouchers awarded that year because of a lack of reliable data and the exclusion of some housing authorities with different rules, this figure is a significant undercount.

“My perspective is still that the voucher program is a highly effective program and has accomplished a lot of what its designers hoped it would,” said Gould Ellen of the Furman Center. “The lesson from these low success rates is not that we should give up on the voucher program, it’s that we really need to scrutinize it and find ways to make it easier to use – for tenants and landlords.”

Why do housing authorities issue too many vouchers?

Housing authorities often give out more vouchers than they can afford at any given time because they know that some families will be unable to use them.

They do this as part of a complex calculation meant to ensure that voucher funding does not go unspent when so many families need the help.

“The way the housing authority looks at it is: ‘I have a list that is endless. If one person can’t use their voucher, the next can,’” said Chapman Semple, the homelessness consultant. “Would they prefer the person they issued the voucher to get it used? They would absolutely prefer that. But they’re a volume business.”

This means that in 2022, when nearly half of families were unsuccessful at finding a home, housing authorities likely issued about two vouchers for every slot for which they had funding, said Rice, the HUD representative.

But the math is not always perfect.

In February 2022, Austin Wardell and his parents were evicted from their home of 14 years in Fontana, California.

Crystal Hammond, 61, Frank Wardell, 64, and Austin, 34, had been renting the home from a relative who died, leaving behind an expensive reverse mortgage they couldn't afford. The bank soon foreclosed.

With nowhere else to go, they applied for a housing voucher, put their belongings in storage and moved into a room at a Motel 6 with their dog and cat.

While they waited for news of their voucher, Crystal continued to spend her mornings working at an elementary school as a library aide, as she has for the past 25 years. Austin cared full-time for his father, who suffered seizures in 2018 that left him with brain damage and a broken back, and he relied on supplemental oxygen.

In May 2023, after more than a year on the waitlist, they got the news that a voucher was finally theirs.

“We were exuberant,” Austin said. They immediately began applying for apartments.

But just a month later, a letter arrived: All the voucher slots had been filled. Though they still had 79 days before their voucher expired, their case had been closed.

“It was a kick in the pants to us all,” Austin said. “It just stripped all of the hope we had away. And ever since, we’ve been struggling.”

In the year since, they have remained in the Motel 6 off Interstate-10. They get by on Frank’s disability benefits, Crystal’s part-time income, and unpredictable donations that come in through a GoFundMe page. If they run out of money, Crystal and Austin plan to admit Frank to a nursing home while they live in their car.

Officials at the Housing Authority of the County of San Bernardino said the Wardell family’s voucher was part of a limited infusion of emergency vouchers issued during the pandemic. All the vouchers had to be used by a certain date, or else the federal government would take them back.

So, the housing authority gave out vouchers to more families than there were slots. When the program filled up, 33 families that were still searching for homes, including the Wardells, had their vouchers revoked.

“Our mission is we need to utilize every voucher we can afford, because that’s really our purpose,” said Rishad Mitha, the housing authority’s deputy executive director.

Housing authorities can usually dip into some of their reserve funding if more people are able to use their vouchers than expected, said Will Fischer, a researcher at the Center on Budget and Policy priorities, a research and policy institute, making what happened to the Wardells relatively rare.

More often, families lose their vouchers because they cannot navigate a competitive housing market alone, and they run out of time.

As long as every voucher gets used, housing authorities have little incentive to help them.

"Housing authorities are not funded to hold the client’s hand in the search process,” Mitha said. “That’s not how the program is structured.”

But some places have found a way around this.

What's the secret to Boston's housing success?

When the Boston Housing Authority opened its housing voucher waitlist in the early 2000s, David Gleich remembers a line of applicants that seemed to stretch a mile down the road.

Gleich, who oversees Boston’s voucher program, knew then that only a lucky minority would qualify for a voucher. Of those, many would be unable to use it.

But that is no longer the case.

Last year, according to the housing authority’s data, 88% of families who received vouchers were able to use them – a success rate more than 30 percentage points above the 2022 national average.

Boston has achieved this despite having one of the most expensive and competitive rental markets in the country. In 2022, its vacancy rate was the lowest of the nation's 10 largest metro areas.

Gleich attributes much of that success to a simple tweak in the authority's approach.

Rather than giving people a voucher and leaving them to their own devices, every tenant is connected with someone who helps them search for a home, Gleich said.

“They work extremely hard to find folks housing and leave no stone unturned,” he said. “They don't stop until the voucher is utilized because they recognize what a tremendous opportunity it is.”

In general, housing authorities do not receive HUD funding for this service. Boston has found a way around that by partnering with the local school district, homeless shelters and other service providers that can fill the gap.

Instead of opening their waitlist to a flood of people every few years like they used to, the housing authority now relies on these organizations to refer them to families in need, and to support them in finding and keeping a home for years to come.

“This has streamlined our entire process,” Gleich said. “And, we also knew this would dramatically increase our success rates.”

Boston has made other changes, including extending the initial search window for voucher holders to find a home to 120 days. And, to make sure renters have the chance to live in more expensive neighborhoods, the voucher’s worth now varies by ZIP code rather than setting a single rate for the entire city.

Other cities have also seen drastic improvements when pairing voucher holders with "navigators.”

A recent study in Seattle found that help navigating the housing search not only increased how often families were able to use their vouchers but also increased the share of families who moved to more affluent neighborhoods from 15% to 53%.

Like Boston, Seattle also relied on outside organizations to fill that need.

"This says to me, ‘Nationally, we’re not doing as well as we could,'" said Stefanie DeLuca, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who co-wrote the Seattle study.

“Because we’ve seen in competitive housing markets, with assistance to families for their housing searches, with landlord outreach, we can do much better than that.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why this affordable housing program is failing many poor families