Special Types of Vouchers
Some vouchers, known as special purpose vouchers, were
created to serve particular groups of families and are subject to special
eligibility criteria, in addition to the normal voucher criteria. These
include:
- welfare-to-work vouchers, for current and former welfare
recipients who are attempting to move to self-sufficiency;
- family unification vouchers, which are provided to
families in cases where the lack of adequate housing has caused (or is
threatening to cause) a child to be removed from the family or has prevented
a child from being reunited with the family;
- disability vouchers, set aside to help disabled people
live independently; and
- tenant protection vouchers, for families that have
been displaced from project-based subsidized housing units. (Most frequently,
these families lived in project-based Section 8 buildings whose owners
opted to leave the program when their contract expired or in public housing
developments that were demolished or converted to mixed-income housing
under the HOPE VI program.) Enhanced vouchers, a subcategory
of tenant protection vouchers, are designed to ensure than tenants can
afford to remain in buildings that left the project-based Section 8 program
or prepaid a federally insured mortgage that had restricted rents.
Also, Congress in 1996 authorized a special demonstration known as Moving
to Work, which allows 32 agencies to experiment with changes to the rules
that apply to a portion or all of their vouchers to encourage families to
move to self-sufficiency.
The percentage of a housing agency's vouchers that are in use is referred
to as the agency's utilization rate. Housing agencies can attain a utilization
rate that is at or close to 100 percent even if their success rate
is low by "overissuing" vouchers, just as airlines over-book flights. For
example, if one out of every five families typically is unable to use its
voucher, the agency can issue five vouchers for every four it has the funds
to support. As discussed below, agencies have access to reserve funds to cover
their costs temporarily if an unexpectedly high number of families use their
vouchers. Largely because many housing agencies make effective use of overissuing,
utilization rates are much higher than success rates. HUD reports indicate
that 94 percent of vouchers were in use in fiscal year 2002, and HUD projects
that utilization will rise to 95 percent in 2003 and 96 percent in 2004.
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