HEARTH resident Qwontajah Myers sits on the floor with her son Jelani Myers, 5, in the community room on Friday, March 28, 2025, at the HEARTH facility. (Photo by Anastasia Busby/PublicSource)
With Trump administration cuts expected to hit public housing, an authority is doubling down on efforts to prepare residents for self-sufficiency, and sometimes homeownership.
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Thousands of residents in the Pittsburgh region rely on federal housing subsidies through housing authorities, but that system could shift under new White House priorities.
The region’s elected officials and the Allegheny County Housing Authority [ACHA] are planning ahead as the Trump administration reportedly looks to cut half of federal workers at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD].
The county’s housing authority sees recent developments as reasons to wean tenants off of public housing and make more households self-sufficient.
“Let’s not just judge ourselves by what HUD judges, which is providing housing. That’s what we’re doing, we’ll always do that. But let’s see how many people we can get off of affordable housing,” said Rich Stephenson, acting executive director of the ACHA. “How many people can use Section 8 as a stepping stone to get off the program? So we started changing our focus.”
Adjust, or cut 1,400 housing vouchers
The authority first sounded the alarm on budgeting anxieties with a Feb. 3 notice to landlords about limiting rental increases for tenants with Housing Choice Vouchers, known as Section 8.
Funding worries were temporarily assuaged after the federal government passed the continuing resolution on March 14.
Congress fully funded the voucher program, but rising rents may outpace HUD’s forecast, raising the risk that some people could lose assistance, or that HUD may have to move money from other accounts to cover the gap, according to Tushar Gurjal, a senior policy analyst for the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials [NAHRO].
A bipartisan consensus on voucher programs lets HUD shift funds to cover any gap, but Gurjal said it’s “not ideal.”
The housing authority has about 6,400 vouchers and 86% of them are used by households.
While limiting rent increases, the authority is also leaning into a HUD guideline of two people per subsidized bedroom.
By requiring two people per bedroom, the housing authority can place more families in smaller, less expensive units — like putting a four-person family in a two-bedroom instead of a three- or four-bedroom — saving money and allowing them to issue more vouchers overall.
Stephenson said that if ACHA hadn’t sent out the letter to the landlords and enacted the policy of two tenants per bedroom, they would have only been able to fund about 5,000 vouchers instead of 6,400.
Combining grants, clearing obstacles
One way to be proactive, Stephenson said, is to make people self-sufficient. “Because you’re never gonna have enough affordable housing, just never gonna happen,” he said. “So what we want to do, and what we’ve been focusing on, let’s help people become self-sufficient. Let’s help the people use the program to get off the program.”
The structure of public housing can discourage self-sufficiency.
If someone with a voucher is unemployed, their monthly payment for housing is $50. But if that person gets a job, they have to pay 30% of their income to their rent.
“They say, ‘Why should I go through all these headaches if all I’m going to do is make more money to pay my landlord more money?’” Stephenson said. “‘Now I got to pay somebody to take care of my children.’” He said people can also lose other benefits, including food aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program [SNAP].
Using HUD Family Self-Sufficiency funding and a grant from the Pennsylvania Housing and Finance Agency, he said, the authority aims to “take away any obstacles or any concerns that a tenant may have with increasing their income.”
Using the state grant, the housing authority is able to provide gift cards to Giant Eagle for tenants who lose their SNAP benefits as a result of entering a higher income bracket. Stephenson said they can also connect their tenants with transportation or care for a loved one.
Medical crisis to self-sufficiency steps
Stephenson noted that not all of their tenants are ready to become homeowners and that’s where job development comes into play in partnerships with Job Corps and the nonprofit HEARTH, which aims to provide services to women who recently experienced homelessness or domestic violence.
Qwontajah Myers has lived with HEARTH since October and is in the process of looking for more stable housing by getting a county voucher. She originally moved to Pittsburgh from South Carolina because one of her children needed a liver transplant, a complex medical procedure that couldn’t be completed there.
“We didn’t have any choice. We were saving her life at this point,” Myers said, adding that she was also leaving an abusive relationship.
After completing the procedure in April 2024, she liked the Pittsburgh area enough to move here.
She eventually learned about HEARTH’s program and applied to live in their apartment complex.
“I have my own bed. This is the first time this has ever happened,” she said. “Being here offered me a normal life. The kids have their own beds. They have a sense of ownership.”
She said she also began to develop a community with other women who were facing similar challenges. “You don’t feel out of place, everyone understands,” she said.
Myers is hoping to “be in a home” and start a health and wellness center for women that helps to build their confidence so they don’t go back to a domestic violence situation.
In the meantime, HEARTH arranged to get her a donated car and is working on her short- and long-term goals of becoming independent.
“It was the latest, best Christmas gift I ever got,” Myers said.
Turning a voucher into homeownership
The county housing authority also established a nonprofit development arm that is able to buy houses, a process they are starting now with an initial purchase of two homes in Jefferson Hills.
“Now our nonprofit entity owns it. Now we’re able to take out a mortgage, just like you would do with your home,” Stephenson said. “So while we try to sell the homes to the people who are in these units, we are going out and identifying homes that are currently on the market, turnkey homes” in the $180,000 to $210,000 range and in desirable neighborhoods and school districts. The authority can use a household’s voucher funding to finance their purchase of a home.
Stephenson said the goal is to break the cycle of poverty by allowing children now in Section 8 homes to go to better school districts.
“Our children, who are already fighting the battles of being in a low-income family, are also in the worst school districts. I can’t change the school districts,” Stephenson said. “What I can do is buy homes, single-family homes in better areas and get those children into those better areas.”
Gainey: Closing HUD offices ‘eliminates the watchdog’
Gurjal, of NAHRO, expects the federal government to reduce the size of HUD.
“We’re on board with removing actual waste and fraud,” Gurjal said. “We don’t know the scope of these cuts and if they are in the range of rumors of 50% to 80%, we feel that could have detrimental impact on how HUD operates.”
At a March 20 event, Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, U.S. Rep. Summer Lee and other officials sounded the alarm on these rumored cuts, claiming there are plans to close the Pittsburgh HUD office and that oversight mechanisms were being “intentionally weakened,” according to Housing Authority City of Pittsburgh board member Jala Rucker.
“There will be less federal workers to help run critical programs, programs that we need that provide us with rental subsidies. That’s important,” Gainey said. “Rental subsidies are real important — help us with disaster recovery efforts, large housing discrimination complaints, investigation and assisting first-time home buyers.”
Gainey appoints board members of the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh, which is separate from the county authority.
“If these rollbacks move forward,” the mayor said, “do you know who will benefit from the cuts from high? Wealthy developers, who will continue to take federal subsidies while neglecting repairs.”
A HUD spokesperson said, in response to questions from PublicSource, that “no final decisions have been made” on closing field offices. “The department understands the important role of field offices and is having ongoing conversations about how to best serve the American people.”
Closing the HUD field office “eliminates the watchdog,” Gainey said. “Streamlining government means improving services, not gutting them,” he said. “We must hold the federal administration accountable.”
Clarification: The description of NAHRO’s analysis of the potential impact of the continuing resolution was amended after initial publication of this story.
Eric Jankiewicz is PublicSource’s economic development reporter and can be reached at ericj@publicsource.org or on Twitter @ericjankiewicz.
This story was fact-checked by Jake Vasilias.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
