Public and Assisted Housing

This report discusses the implications of linking federal housing assistance to supportive services to promote self-sufficiency for low income families. The Family Self-Sufficiency Program has been established within the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to promote local strategies for helping low income families achieve greater self-sufficiency. GAO concludes that several factors will affect the evaluation and administration of the program. First, requiring public housing agencies (PHA) to report how many program participants have relinquished housing assistance and what alternatives to assisted housing they have found will permit meaningful and consistent assessments of the program's progress. Second, it is too early to tell whether HUD's proposed prohibition against the use of motivation as a factor in selecting program participants will affect how PHAs run their programs--including their ability to obtain needed support services. Finally, only limited data are available to determine the extent to which HUD's reimbursement of PHAs' administrative costs will cover the reasonable expenses that PHAs incur in running effective programs.

GAO found that: (1) the National Affordable Housing Act does not explicitly define the terms self-sufficiency and economic independence but implies that these conditions have been attained when a family under the Family Self-Sufficiency Program no longer receives federal, state, or local assistance for housing; (2) proposed Housing and Urban Development (HUD) guidelines do not specifically require the public housing agency (PHA) to report how many participants have relinquished housing assistance or to indicate what alternatives to assistance housing program participants have found; (3) PHA and legal service organizations differ in their opinions over the proposed HUD exclusion of applicants' motivation as a criterion for selection, although some see the prohibition as fair, numerous PHA believe that the HUD guideline may make the program more difficult to administer; (4) PHA must rely on local service providers to obtain such supportive services that program participants need as job training and child care, and PHA do not receive any additional funds from HUD to pay for those services; (5) local job and housing markets may prevent some participants from achieving self-sufficiency, since jobs available to participants do not pay enough to allow a family to live independently in their area, or participants may not be able to afford unsubsidized housing in some highly populated metropolitan areas; (6) many PHA believe that HUD reimbursement for the costs of administering the program will not be adequate to allow PHA to operate an effective program; and (7) although the proposed HUD guidelines do not require PHA to report the costs of administering the program, if HUD reimbursement does not cover those expenses, PHA may absorb the additional costs or run less effective programs.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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