RALEIGH – The federal government has been running a means-tested voucher program for decades now, and its inherent problems are visible and deserving of immediate legislative attention.
No, I’m not talking about those vouchers. Indeed, one of the flaws in the ongoing and spirited debate about school vouchers is the notion that distributing public dollars to recipients and allowing them to choose a service provider is something new. Both federal and state governments have used vouchers or voucher-like mechanisms for decades now. Food Stamps are one example. Another, and one that desperately needs reform, is the Section 8 voucher program that provides housing assistance to millions of Americans of modest incomes.
Howard Husock, a Harvard University scholar who is one of the nation’s leading experts on housing policy, lays out the problems with this expensive and often counterproductive program in a New York Post column. While housing vouchers are clearly preferable to the government building and operating public-housing projects – one of the most disastrous public policies of the past half-century – they have not been subject to the kinds of work requirements and time limits imposed on cash-welfare grants in the mid-1990s. As a result, Husock writes, “just as welfare once did, [Section 8 vouchers] facilitate the creation of single-parent households – families most at risk of dependency and in which kids disproportionately fail to flourish.”
Because of the way the eligibility criteria are set, recipients of housing assistance have a strong incentive not to let their wage income, or at least the income they report to the government and are taxed on, to rise significantly. This means avoiding regular, above-board employment. It means avoiding marriage.
The best policy in this area would be for the federal government to get out of the housing business altogether. The U.S. Constitution authorizes no such program. But nobody in politics cares much for the enumerated-powers doctrine, so this argument unfortunately stands little chance of prevailing.
The next-best policy would be to reform housing vouchers the way Congress reformed cash welfare a decade ago. There ought to be time limits and work requirements imposed on voucher recipiency, as well as other rules promoting personal responsibility. But Husock doesn’t believe that the Democratic minority in the Senate would allow such a bill to escape a filibuster – and that scenario assumes that risk-averse Republicans in the majority would be willing to move such a bill in the first place.
So the next-next-best policy, a Bush administration idea called the “Flexible Voucher Plan” and endorsed by Husock, would stop the business of giving local housing authorities their Section 8 dollars on a per-capita basis. Instead, the federal dollars would come in the form of lump sums. The authorities would gain supplemental administrative funding if they served a higher-than-average number of families, and would face the prospect of seeing their Section 8 contract outsourced (to use today’s trendy term) to private firms if they served a relatively small number. The idea would be to arm housing authorities with both the incentive and the flexibility to use devices such as flat-amount rents and even time limits to move more recipients up and out of dependency.
I think this experiment is worth trying, but I’m not that optimistic about success. Trying to get public-housing authorities indirectly to do responsible things with handouts that Congress isn’t willing to do itself through direct legislation seems like a difficult gambit to pull off. Still, with billions of our tax dollars accomplishing little more than the perpetuation of poverty and the continued formation of single-parent families, which are devastating to children and costly to society, we can’t afford to let the housing-voucher program continue on its present course while hoping that federal policymakers rediscover either the constitution or their nerve.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.