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CHA Lags on Section 8 Tenancy Approvals Chicago falls behind major cities in getting Section 8 voucher holders into their apartments. BY MORLEY MUSICK
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ore than forty-nine thousand Chicagoans rely on federally funded housing-choice vouchers to afford their apartments each month. The vouchers, commonly referred to as “Section 8” after the part of the 1937 Housing Act that mandated them, are distributed by the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and pick up the cost left over after tenants pay thirty percent of their income toward the cost of renting market-rate apartments. Before a voucher-holding tenant can move into their apartment, both the landlord and the unit must undergo a federally mandated background check and inspection process. The CHA’s inspection and approval process can often drag on for weeks, and is significantly slower, on average, than those of at least two other public housing agencies. Because the vouchers help tenants afford market-rate apartments, they’re supposed to provide low-income renters with choice in where to live. Chicago’s housing voucher program has apparently failed to provide this mobility; more voucher holders live in South Shore and Austin than in all of the city’s nineteen majority-white communities combined. The slowness of the request for tenancy approval—or RTA, also called the “leaseup,” process—may contribute to voucher holders’ reduced ability to compete for apartments, thereby impacting their mobility. Via Freedom of Information Act requests, the Weekly obtained data from the CHA showing how long it took tenants to get approved to move 30 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
into their units last summer, as well as comparable documents from the New York City Housing Authority and the King County Housing Authority, which services the metro area around Seattle. CHA provided data from April 9 to August 11, 2020; NYC, from April 9 to September 17; and King County, from April 9 to September 20. An analysis found that during that period, some thirty percent of Chicago tenants were able to complete the leaseup process in thirty days or less, compared with fifty-six percent of tenants in King County, and ninety-six percent of tenants in NYC’s Housing Authority. More than twenty-seven percent of Chicago tenants waited longer than fifty days for their lease-up, compared to fourteen percent in King County. Zero tenants in NYC waited more than fifty days for their lease-up during the period we analyzed. Chicagoans who hold vouchers already face a slew of challenges finding apartments, many of which stem from long-entrenched racism and discriminatory housing practices. The lagging lease-up processing times only add to the difficulty. Researchers who study housing cite the vouchers’ low value and landlord discrimination as key factors as to why vouchers don’t provide mobility. Landlords who can make more money from private market tenants have less incentive to accept voucher holders and may also be biased against them, perceiving voucher holders as unreliable tenants. A 2015 study published in Housing Policy Debate found landlords consider voucher holders unattractive because
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ILLUSTRATION BY ELLIE MEJÍA
accepting them as tenants required too much paperwork, inspections, and often entailed administrative errors on the part of public housing agencies. “Poor administration of voucher rental applications and extended lease-up processes only compound the obstacles of discrimination and poverty, making it extremely difficult to compete with non-voucher-assisted renters,” said Ben Goldsmith, an independent housing researcher who worked with housing choice voucher holders for several years. “The toll is enormous. It creates a race to the bottom in which only the least desirable rentals are within reach. It hinders mobility and magnifies segregation rather than combating it.” The CHA gives itself more time for its lease-up process than either the NYC or King County housing agencies do. The CHA says its RTA process takes thirty-six days, whereas NYCHA states that owners can expect new lease contracts approved in thirty days or less and King County’s administrative plan explains that moveins can occur after a fifteen-day apartment and landlord approval process.
Though the landlord approval step of the CHA’s RTA process has a sevenbusiness-day target length, Goldsmith, who worked with voucher tenants while employed at Housing Choice Partners from February 2018 to June 2019, said the actual approval process takes “minutes, not weeks.” Much of the responsibility for the lethargic pace of lease-up approvals may fall with the private contractor who administers the voucher process, Nan McKay & Associates, which calls itself “the leading provider of professional services to the affordable housing industry.” Records obtained via a FOIA request and reviewed by the Weekly show that between October 2019 and January 2020, the firm fell below the CHA’s performance benchmarks—sometimes by as much as seventy percent—in the majority of areas that the CHA measures. In one example, Nan McKay produced a Housing Assistance Payments contract (a document needed to complete a leaseup for a voucher holding tenant) on time in only thirty-eight percent of cases over this time.
