During today's economic crises and for the past 10 years, is it considered of low moral to live on a Section 8 voucher? How many people within arms reach are currently living on Section 8 and how many people would honestly admit they do?

Below are stats about section 8 including the amount of families on section 8, their income situation, race, and earning status. As a program that started by moving low-income families from housing projects to better homes, is Section 8 working for Blacks, or is it a hindrance? Please comment afterward.

The Profile
The Section 8 program is successfully serving a large variety of types of families. Of the 1.4 million families currently being served, 64 percent are families with children, 15 percent are elderly families or individuals, and 13 percent are persons with disabilities.

The families receiving Section 8 assistance are 40 percent white, 41 percent black, 16 percent Hispanic, 2 percent Asian, and 1 percent Native American. Forty-six percent of the families with children have their primary income from wages, 36 percent from public assistance, and the remainder from Social Security, SSI, and pensions.

Families with tenant-based assistance are very poor; their median income is $8,663. While families with children have a slightly larger median income of $9,654, as we have seen, less than one-half of them have their primary income from wages, and even among families who do work, average income is only $14,657.

Discussions of urban problems often focus on a concentration of poverty in a neighborhood as a cause of a host of urban ills including crime, joblessness, teen parenthood, and substance abuse. For this reason, high-rise public housing has come under much criticism because of its density and concentration of low-income families.

Thus, the use of Section 8 vouchers to help families move from neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and social ills, including concentrated and distressed public housing developments, is a policy that can help improve both the lives of families and the future of neighborhoods.

For example, results from the Gautreaux program in Chicago offer some encouraging results. Adult members of families who moved to the suburbs with help from the program had higher employment rates and their children were more likely to succeed in school and go on to college (U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, April 1995).

Funding Under Various Administrations
From the passage of the 1974 Act through FY94, year after year Congress renewed funding for previously issued certificates and vouchers and enacted incremental housing certificates. Through 1980, over 600,000 certificates were provided, and by 1994, the total of certificates and vouchers had climbed to 1.4 million.

With enactment of the Fiscal Year 1995 Rescissions Act (Public Law 104-19), the Congress stopped providing incremental tenant-based assistance, though it did continue to renew expiring certificates and vouchers. Secretary Cuomo underscored the need for further expansion of the program and, as part of the negotiations on the Fiscal Year 1999 VA-HUD Appropriations Act, which included the QHWRA, Congress began to once again fund incremental tenant-based housing assistance.

As part of the Fiscal Year 1999 VA-HUD Appropriations Act, after 4 years with no new incremental Section 8 units, Congress provided 50,000 new vouchers to be competitively awarded to support families making the transition from welfare to work. In FY2000 another 60,000 units were provided that were not directed to a particular housing purpose or clientele, but rather will be competitively awarded to PHAs through a Notice of Funding Availability after funds are first allocated to HUD's field offices through a needs-based fair share formula.

[In other words: The Bush Administration funded Section 8 while during the Clinton Administration it was not.]

As Secretary Cuomo fought for the continued funding of Section 8 vouchers, he relied on HUD's Worst Case Needs analyses of American Housing Survey data. The data show that 5.4 million very-low-income renter households are in need of housing assistance because they live in housing with severe physical problems, pay more than 50 percent of their incomes for rent, or both. Even as America's economy has experienced unprecedented, sustained growth, the need for housing assistance has not declined.

The need for incremental assistance is also underscored by the size of the waiting lists for the Section 8 program and public housing. There is a national average time on the waiting list of 11 months for public housing and 28 months for Section 8 vouchers, but in large cities the wait is much, much longer.

In New York City, a family must wait 8 years for public housing and, in Washington, D.C. or Cleveland, 5 years. In New York City or Washington, the wait for Section 8 is 8 years; in Los Angeles it is 10 years. The combined waiting lists in Chicago alone could consume all 60,000 vouchers appropriated in FY2000 (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, March 1999). Multi-year waiting lists discourage families from applying, and this result in an underestimation of the number of interested applicants.

Source from: http://www.huduser.org/publications/doc/look.doc