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Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
Among the bills to be completed is the Transportation-Treasury-HUD bill, which includes funding for most federal housing programs.
A key item in the bill is the appropriation for Section 8 vouchers, the nation's leading form of housing assistance for low-income families.
Over the past three years, Congress and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have made a series of changes in the formula that determines how voucher funds are distributed among the 2,400 state and local housing agencies that administer the program.
These changes have had the unintended effect of destabilizing the program and causing shortfalls at many housing agencies, even as other agencies have received more voucher funding than they can use.
The President's budget requested $14.4 billion to renew housing vouchers in fiscal year 2007, and the House and Senate Appropriations Committees included that amount in their appropriations bills.
A major issue that will confront Congress when it fashions the final HUD appropriations bill is thus what approach to use to allocate funding for existing housing vouchers.
The position taken earlier this year by HUD and the House Appropriations Committee was that the current funding formula, which distributes funds on the basis of data that in 2007 will be up to three years old, should be retained despite its flaws.
In June, however, the House Financial Services Committee, which is responsible for setting housing policy, approved a bill --- H. R. 5443, the Section 8 Voucher Reform Act (or SEVRA) --- that contains a much improved funding formula.
Posted on October 30, 2006 06:46 PM
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