The Housing Authority of Pittsburgh’s Legacy Apartments in Pittsburgh’s Middle Hill neighborhood on Thursday, Oct. 5, 2023, in the Hill District. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
A year after the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh pledged to improve its Section 8 program, the numbers are up, but landlord concerns persist.
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Leaders at Pittsburgh’s housing authority boast that a renewed Section 8 department is addressing problems with the Housing Choice Voucher program that had contributed to tenant displacement and homelessness, but some housing activists and landlords continue to question the extent of these improvements.
In April 2023, tenants, landlords, a former Housing Authority City of Pittsburgh board member and a former HACP administrator outlined concerns with the administration of the program, which allows tenants to rent housing and pay 30% of their income, with the agency covering the balance. A year ago, HACP Executive Director Caster Binion and the agency board’s then-chair pledged improvements. The board also underwent a shift in leadership by recently electing Mayor Ed Gainey’s Chief of Staff Jake Wheatley to lead the board with a housing advocate, Jala Rucker, elected as second in command.
In a July interview, Marsha Grayson, the housing authority’s Chief Operations Officer, said the agency has taken measures to address the issues, including hiring more Section 8 staff and training them properly.
Binion added: “We’re looking to progress and improve customer service and bring things to the way they were prior to the pandemic.”
During a July 25 meeting of the HACP board, several housing activists questioned decisions made related to the program. Landlord advocates interviewed for this story reported continuing issues including delayed inspections and resulting slow payments for their Section 8 voucher holding tenants.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD], which oversees the Section 8 program and all housing authorities, said the authority last year implemented a “corrective action plan” to improve the Section 8.
“HUD met regularly with HACP to monitor their progress,” HUD wrote in a statement. “They have significantly improved administration of their Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program including customer service and landlord and tenant relations. HUD is not currently conducting additional oversight of the HACP’s HCV Program beyond HUD’s routine housing authority monitoring.”
Rucker declined to comment but Wheatley said his recent move to leading the HACP board is part of Gainey’s style of leadership, preferring to assess situations first before making a decision.
“We had some members who fell off the board and very good advocates like [former HACP board member Tammy Thompson] who expressed real concerns with what was happening there,” Wheatley said, adding that the mayor’s goal is to reach out and listen to housing authority residents to see what they want and to help expand affordable housing options.
“We want to really use the housing authority as a key figure to drive affordability in the city,” Wheatley said, adding that he believed Binion will be a strong partner in achieving Gainey’s affordability goals.
“My opinion, he’s been very transparent and willing to work with us. He’s been very open and doing a lot of the things we want to do,” he said. “We’ve seen improvement in the system, especially in Section 8.”
Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato is also hoping to spur the creation of more affordable housing. In June, she announced her initiative to make 500 affordable housing units available in 500 days, for people to move from shelters to stable housing.
“We’re going to be the primary persons on that,” Binion said, noting that he had received a call from an occupancy specialist informing him that the county’s Department of Human Services had referred 50 people to him as part of the initiative.
Section 8 numbers up
For this fiscal year, HACP has $61.7 million in funds allocated for the Housing Choice Voucher program. Last year, the authority’s allocation for its Housing Choice Voucher program was $60.5 million.
During the week of March 11, the Housing Choice Voucher program opened for people to apply; 11,700 households are on the waiting list for Section 8.
“A lot of housing authorities overissue [vouchers] because they know not everyone who gets a voucher finds a place to use it. So housing authorities have to play this balancing game between overissuing vouchers and finding places.”
Christi Economy, a research associate for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley.
In total, the housing authority has 5,600 vouchers available for use. About 5,171 vouchers are considered actively being used through various voucher types, including Section 8 vouchers.
A representative for the housing authority noted that in a slow market not everyone with a voucher will find a place, allowing the authority to overissue vouchers.
Binion said the authority has issued 1,107 vouchers so far this year, with 706 households signing leases using vouchers. If the other voucher holders don’t find a lease, a number of things could happen, including voucher expiration or an extension to continue searching for an apartment.
About 951 voucher holders are actively seeking housing. Another 126 are in the process of getting their units inspected to ensure they meet the authority’s requirements for living conditions.
The housing authority’s leadership recalled last year’s numbers to illustrate their improvement in using vouchers.
In October, there were 72 contracts signed for tenants, according to Binion.
Binion said that by January, the housing authority had increased its pace. He said the authority is now working with landlords to finalize 100 contracts at any given time.
“These are people who are getting keys to front doors. They had a voucher, went and found a unit, signed a lease, got keys. It’s a good number.”
He also said that they have been able to reduce the time it takes to process voucher applications.
“Back then, last summer, we had 230 to 240 contracts we were processing and a whole lot of them were late because we didn’t have the staff to execute the contracts,” Binion said, adding that now 90% of contracts with landlords and property owners are being processed in fewer than 60 days.
“So that means we’re taking care of those contracts quickly,” Binion said. “Way different from where we were last year at this time.”
Landlord outreach incomplete
The tenant-based Section 8 program relies on landlords to participate in the program by accepting voucher holders.
Former board member Thompson resigned from her position in 2022 because she thought the authority was contributing to homelessness in the region. A nonprofit landlord at the time requested that the authority make good on years of backpay in Section 8 rent.
To address these concerns, Binion said the authority put together a landlord advisory group to better understand the situation.
“We had a robust landlord meeting [in July],” said Michelle Sandidge, the housing authority’s chief community affairs officer, noting that 20 to 25 landlords participated.
Authority officials say they instituted monthly meetings of a Landlord Advisory Counsel that can be accessed in person or Zoom. There are currently 1,413 landlords involved in the Section 8 program. HACP also developed a Housing Choice Voucher client advisory group.
“They had a number of good things to say about where we are now,” Sandidge said. “They were talking about issues we had and how we worked through them.”
She continued, “We’ve done a good job to make sure landlords are being paid on time.”
The authority did not respond to a request to make any of the landlords who attended available for comment.
John Petrack, the executive vice president of the Realtors Association of Metropolitan Pittsburgh, said he had heard of the formation of such a committee but he didn’t know of any of the landlord members.
“I know quite a few landlords and property owners,” Petrack said. The association advocates on behalf of real estate consumers and in protection of private property rights. “Unfortunately the people I’ve spoken with are still to some extent echoing the same issues as last year.”
He said landlords who specialize in Section 8 have continued to report issues with the housing authority.
“There’s still issues with processing, not only payments, but other processing issues, too,” Petrack said. “One property manager waited 90 to 120 days before the inspection and process took place. That’s three to four months of not receiving rent and they told this poor gentleman he could have the apartment.”
“Tenant says, ‘I want to move in.’ Landlord says, ‘let’s go,’ and then it just takes too long and property owners are losing time and money,” Petrack said.
Housing authority spokesperson Chuck Rohrer said the multiple steps involved can lead to delays. “There are instances where this happens and we’re working to improve turnaround overall.”
Petrack observed that the rental economy is healthy, meaning that vacancy rates for apartments are low and fewer people are buying homes.
“So more people are renting,” Petrack said. “Real estate is supply and demand in its purest form.”
Staff revamped, retrained
Binion said that last year the authority experienced a major turnover of staff and leadership in the Housing Choice Voucher department. They now have about 34 staffers in the department, after hitting a low of 20 staffers in April 2023, according to Binion.
“They needed to get acclimated,” Binion said.
To train the new staff, the authority’s board hired CVR and Associates in October, granting them an eight-month contract with several renewal options.
The contract was awarded without the competitive request for proposals that government entities typically use to gather and compare contract proposals. The board stated that the proposal system could be sidestepped since CVR had a similar contract with another housing authority in California.
HUD referred a request for comment to elaborate on this alternate process to the authority’s leadership.
Binion said the training was winding down.
Program paused, funds shifted
The city’s housing authority has a special HUD designation called Moving to Work, allowing it to reallocate federal funding. This year, the authority redirected more than $16 million from Section 8 and Low Income Public Housing funding to other programs, primarily for their Development and Modernization programs and Resident and Protective Services.
At the HACP board’s July 25 meeting, Megan Confer-Hammond questioned the moving of these funds, citing public notice by the authority on July 2 notifying voucher holders about a pause in a program designed to increase housing choice and unit quality. Hammond is the executive director of the Fair Housing Partnership of Greater Pittsburgh, a nonprofit group that advocates for adherence to the federal Fair Housing Act.
The program, Rehabilitation Payment Standards, is designed to give property owners and management companies incentives to improve their units being rented by voucher holders by providing more assistance if repairs and upgrades total $6,000 or more.
The program is being paused “due to exponential growth,” according to the authority. The notice does not list a date for the resumption of this program but it won’t happen any sooner than 2025. At present, 135 landlords are receiving assistance through the rehabilitation program.
Confer-Hammond asked the board members for more information about the decision including, “How much additional money is needed to maintain the payment standard? How many units are receiving the payment standard? What are potential changes being considered for modifying the payment standard?”
She posed her questions during the public comment section of the meeting during which the board and staff typically do not respond.
Voucher difficulties are a national problem
The challenges that the authority and city face aren’t unique as increased rents across the nation make it harder to find cheaper housing options.
Nationally, about 60% of people with vouchers are able to find a place to use them, according to Christi Economy, a research associate for the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. The organization is working with RAND Corporation on a $400,000 study to identify the best practices housing authorities have come up with in finding leases for Section 8 vouchers.
“A lot of housing authorities overissue [vouchers] because they know not everyone who gets a voucher finds a place to use it,” Economy said. “So housing authorities have to play this balancing game between overissuing vouchers and finding places.”
She said high rent is a persistent issue in many parts of the country.
“If they want vouchers to be competitive, they have to set payment standards in a competitive way, which means people get successfully housed,” so each voucher has more buying power but the authorities can’t afford as many vouchers, Economy said.
Many housing authorities feel strapped for resources, she continued. “And [they’re] trying to use these really powerful vouchers despite external factors, like stigma landlords might hold or lack of affordable units, so it’s a tricky balancing act for them in a lot of ways.”
Eric Jankiewicz is PublicSource’s economic development reporter, and can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @ericjankiewicz.
This story was fact-checked by Laura Turbay.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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