Last November’s presidential and congressional elections established new leadership in Washington with responsibility for the country’s affordable housing policy. PHADA believes it is important to share its goals for public housing legislation with these new leaders to take advantage of their fresh outlook on how to improve the program’s funding and the delivery of public housing to the nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

These documents will describe the major initiatives PHADA hopes that the 111th Congress and the new administration will undertake this year. These include having the Section 8 Reform Act (SEVRA) finally pass both houses of Congress. It contains such important provisions as making the unit based Section 8 funding formula permanent, simplifying certain administrative provisions and expanding the innovative Moving-to-Work program to include additional agencies.

In addition, PHADA plans to propose a significant small public housing authority reform bill. A recent HUD commissioned study found that HUD oversight of these agencies far exceeded the financial and programmatic risk they pose. As a result, PHADA will propose legislation that reduces this oversight significantly and broadens the simplification of rent and administrative procedures begun in SEVRA. While accomplishing these goals, it will retain the current framework of not having rent exceed 30 percent of income, outside of a minimum rent, as well as current income targeting standards that guarantee placement of extremely low-income families along with other existing tenant protections.

In terms of funding, PHADA proposes to support the idea that came out of last summer’s meeting entitled The Future of Public Housing which called for hundreds of thousands of public housing units to convert to either project based assistance or project based vouchers. This conversion will create a more reliable funding stream that will also provide additional resources enabling public housing properties to leverage private funding to eliminate the more than $20 billion capital fund backlog.

PHADA also plans to offer legislation to promote energy conservation by creating a real incentive for housing authorities to reduce energy consumption. By freezing the rolling base for 20 years across the board, rather than just for specific measures governed by an energy services contract, Congress could open the floodgates to housing authority creativity by allowing agencies to retain energy savings no matter how they were achieved.

The viewpoints of its members will be represented during the ongoing debates addressing the reauthorization of the critical HOPE VI program. Such important issues concerning the ability to improve and reposition the public housing portfolio as one for one replacement will be very much under discussion during this congressional session. PHADA will also be engaged legislatively in attempts to improve the Real Estate Assessment Center (REAC), though this area is complicated because of competing interests of multifamily housing providers that are also subject to its evaluation.

Finally, PHADA will continue to support legislation underway for several years to authorize permanently the exemption from asset management of agencies with fewer than 500 units.

Convert Portion of Public Housing to Project-Based Model

REAC Inspections Improvement Act

Public Housing Energy Conservation Incentive

Section 8 Voucher Reform Act (SEVRA)

HOPE VI

Small HA Regulation Reform