Greg Jaczko: Welcome to the Capital Commonsense Podcast. I’m Greg Jaczko. On this episode, we will hear from Kevin Corinth, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Kevin recently wrote a piece for Capital Commonsense about how the housing voucher program works in the District. He argues that the program could serve more families if changes were made to the payment structure. This is a complicated policy program, and Kevin is here to explain it to us and offer his ideas about how to make it work better for DC families. So welcome, Kevin.
Kevin Corinth: Thanks very much for having me.
Greg Jaczko: Could you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your connection to the District?
Kevin Corinth: Sure, I’d be happy to. I’ve been living in the District for 12 years. Two of my three kids were born in DC, and they all attend DC public and charter schools. My wife is a teacher at a charter school in DC. So we’ve been here a long time. I’ve actually lived in DC longer than any other place in my whole life. I definitely enjoy many parts of it: the urban atmosphere, being amid all the museums and the government institutions, but also the local culture. It’s a place we’ve really grown to call home, and I definitely want to see it succeed going forward.
Greg Jaczko: In that vein, maybe we can talk a little bit about what the housing voucher program is, how it works, and what role the payment standard plays. That seems to be an important part of the piece you wrote for Capital Commonsense.
Kevin Corinth: Sure. Technically, this is the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program. It’s a federally created and funded program that’s very important nationwide, providing assistance to families renting apartments in the private market. It differs from programs like public housing, where the government itself builds and manages the housing. These are vouchers that families can get, and they help pay the rent for apartments in the private market.
In DC, families can apply for housing vouchers. Well, they could apply, but the waitlist is actually closed, because there’s not enough funding for every family who needs it. This is not a program like food stamps or SNAP, where if you’re eligible, you get it. Here, if you’re eligible, you may be able to get assistance, but you have to go onto a waiting list, which can take many years to resolve, and many families never get assistance despite needing it.
Greg Jaczko: Kevin, could you talk a little bit about what percentage of people who are eligible for the program are able to get vouchers, compared to those who aren’t? Is it 20% or 30%?
Kevin Corinth: Nationally, the number is about one in four. So out of every four families that are eligible, one actually gets it, only a 25% receipt rate. I haven’t seen similar numbers for DC, although it’s worth noting that the waiting list is closed. So if you’re a low-income family in DC right now who’s eligible for the program, you can’t even get on the waiting list, because there’s not enough assistance for all the families who might need it.
Greg Jaczko: So that’s really, in a way, the crux of the issue: there’s this need, and yet the program isn’t able to satisfy the demand that’s out there.
Kevin Corinth: Yeah, that is a very frustrating problem with the program. It’s a frustrating problem throughout the country, but particularly in DC. There’s not going to be enough funding provided by the federal government. DC does supplement it with its own smaller portion, but there’s not enough funding to serve every family. So it’s important to use all the money we have to serve as many families as we possibly can, so that we’re helping low-income families in a fair and effective way.
Greg Jaczko: I kind of interrupted your explanation of the program. Maybe talk a little more about how it actually works and what this payment standard is.
Kevin Corinth: Sure, happy to. Once a family is eligible and applies, that day may eventually come when they get off the waiting list and are offered a voucher. Once they get the voucher, they can take it into the private rental market and find an apartment to rent. The amount they have to pay is equal to about 30% of their income. So if you have very little income, the family itself pays very little of the rent, and the government pays the remaining share.
This can be a very expensive subsidy, especially in a place like DC, where rents are relatively expensive. It could be a couple thousand dollars in subsidy every month for the government. Mechanically, the government pays the landlord its share directly, and the tenant pays their own share. And there’s no time limit and no work requirement. As long as the tenant is making their payments, isn’t damaging the unit, and doesn’t get evicted, they can stay potentially as long as they want.
The key issue I’ve been focusing on, which is the topic of my recent piece for Capital Commonsense, is the so-called payment standard. The payment standard is set by the DC Housing Authority. The federal government provides the funding and sets the general rules for the program, but the DC Housing Authority gets to determine the payment standard.
That’s essentially the maximum rent of an apartment a family can get. So say an apartment is listed for $3,000 a month. The family asks, okay, can I actually get this? Well, it depends on whether that amount is above or below the payment standard.
And it turns out the DC Housing Authority sets these payment standards extremely high. Hopefully listeners are familiar with the DC rental market. We’re not San Francisco, but apartments are expensive. Yet for a three-bedroom apartment, a family could rent a unit for up to $5,300, or $5,301, and still have the government cover all of the rent except for the tenant family’s contribution of 30% of their own income.
Greg Jaczko: And where does that number come from? Is there a formula the DC Housing Authority uses? How do they derive it?
Kevin Corinth: It’s 187% of the fair market rent. The fair market rent is set by the federal government, by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It’s supposed to equal about the 40th percentile of rents in the area, adjusted for new renters, because apartments are sometimes more expensive for new renters than for existing ones. But it’s intended to be around the 40th percentile of market rents in the area, and the federal government suggests that’s a good baseline. Typically, cities are supposed to set the payment standard between 90% and 110% of the fair market rent.
In DC, the fair market rent is much lower than these payment standards. The DC Housing Authority has decided to set its payment standard much higher, at 187% of the fair market rent. I did some calculations in the Capital Commonsense post that would put it at about the 90th percentile of rents in the District. So in theory, a family could rent an apartment more expensive than 90% of apartments in the District.
Now, to be clear, it doesn’t have to be that high. That’s just the maximum. A family doesn’t have to find an apartment that costs $5,300. They may find one that’s $3,000 or $4,000, and those are all allowed. But it does enable those higher rents.
Greg Jaczko: And is the federal payment capped at the difference between the family’s 30% contribution and whatever the actual rent is? Or does it go as high as the actual voucher value? In other words, could the voucher overpay?
Kevin Corinth: The voucher can’t overpay. At most, for a three-bedroom apartment, the largest government contribution would be $5,301. Technically, a family can get an apartment that exceeds that amount, but every dollar above the payment standard, the family has to cover themselves. So they could do that, but they may not want to, because they’re bearing the expense of that decision.
Greg Jaczko: And you said that in DC, the payment standard is set at 187% of the fair market rent. How does that compare to other comparable cities? Is that what New York or San Francisco does? Where do they set that figure?
Kevin Corinth: DC is completely out of line with what other high-cost cities do. DC has a much less expensive housing market than San Francisco, and yet DC has a higher payment standard than San Francisco. You can also compare it to cities like Boston, New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle. All these other high-cost cities, which actually have higher costs than DC, have much lower payment standards. They all set their payment standards around the fair market rent.
Some places, like Los Angeles and Boston, actually set different payment standards depending on the cost of a given neighborhood, basically by zip code. They’re saying some neighborhoods within Los Angeles or Boston are a little more expensive, or way more expensive, than others, so they vary the payment standard based on each zip code’s rents. That’s an authority housing authorities are allowed to use, and one the DC Housing Authority has not chosen to use.
Greg Jaczko: We’ll come back to that, because as I understand it, that’s part of your solution to improve the program: moving to more of a neighborhood-based standard for market rents. But before we get there, can you talk about the motivation? What’s the motivation behind having this higher voucher standard, and what are its advantages?
Kevin Corinth: I think there are a couple of motivations, and the motivations themselves are sound. The biggest one is that we want to make sure low-income families who get these vouchers have access to opportunity. We don’t want them stuck in the lowest-income zip codes with the lowest-quality housing. We want to promote socioeconomic integration. There’s research showing that low-income families, especially when their kids are young, benefit from living in higher-opportunity neighborhoods, which gives them more access to higher-quality schools in the District and puts them closer to public transportation. Those are real rationales. I think one of the rationales behind this high payment standard is to ensure that low-income families aren’t simply stuck in poorer areas but can access a wider array of places throughout the city.
And there is one safeguard here. It’s not that a family just says, “I’m going to rent this apartment,” and the DC Housing Authority says okay. They do perform a rent reasonableness check. Say I go and say, “I want this three-bedroom apartment. I have this voucher. The rent is $5,000.” There’s a process that checks whether that rent is reasonable for the area. If it’s a nice apartment in a nice area, maybe that really is the market rent, and it gets approved. And we need to think about whether that’s a good idea.
But we also need to keep in mind that the rent reasonableness check is not perfect. It’s done through a third-party website, it can take a couple of weeks, and it may not capture all the attributes of an apartment. It may end up leading to overpayments to landlords, who can capture extra subsidy above what they could get at the market rate.
So there are rationales behind a somewhat high payment standard, but I think there are better ways to achieve those goals than simply saying $5,300 for a three-bedroom apartment citywide. I don’t think that’s the right way.
Greg Jaczko: On the flip side, then, what’s the downside of having that high value?
Kevin Corinth: I think there are two, and I touched on this a bit already. One, it enables landlord abuse of the program, even with a rent reasonableness check. It’s possible for landlords to slip through the cracks, either because the check wasn’t done well, or because it was done well but there were things about the property that couldn’t be determined from this kind of third-party website review. So there’s a sense in which landlords could be capturing some of the subsidy that should be going to low-income families, taking it as extra profit they shouldn’t be getting.
And there have been documented cases of this. The Washington Post has done some of its own reporting, and others have looked into it. DC was actually audited by the federal government over issues related to this. So this is not just hypothetical. There has been landlord abuse of the program when payment standards are set this high. With a lower payment standard, you could still have some landlord abuse, but it would limit how much they could do, because there’s a smaller delta between the market rent and what they could actually capture.
Greg Jaczko: And who bears responsibility there? This is a blended program: the federal government provides the funding, but the District has implementation authority. So who’s responsible for limiting landlord abuse? Is it a federal obligation, or does it fall to the District and the DC Housing Authority?
Kevin Corinth: The DC Housing Authority is in charge of administering the program, so it’s responsible for mitigating and eliminating landlord abuse. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the federal government have oversight responsibility, and if they find the DC Housing Authority isn’t doing well, they can conduct audits and actually require it to make payments back to undo the damage. So it’s a shared responsibility.
But who’s ultimately hurt by it is low-income families in DC, because it’s a fixed pot of dollars the federal government provides to the District to administer the vouchers. Every dollar captured by a landlord is one less dollar for other low-income families who are on the waiting list, or who can’t even get onto the waiting list to get the assistance they need.
Greg Jaczko: Yeah, and it seems like that’s really the issue underlying a lot of your piece: striking a balance between giving families the opportunity to get the best apartment they can and, since it’s a fixed pot of money, making sure as many families as possible can access the program. And we know, as you said at the beginning, that it’s not serving every eligible family. Talk a little bit about how you’d approach that, and how we could allow more families into the program by changing the way the payment standard or payment structure works in the District.
Kevin Corinth: Sure. And I think it’s true that it’s not just about mitigating landlord abuse. There’s another issue here: we just want to serve more families. Even if there were no landlord abuse in the program, I personally don’t think it makes sense to say one family gets to rent a three-bedroom apartment in the District for $5,300 and another family gets nothing at all. I would much rather have families still able to access some of these better, higher-cost neighborhoods, but perhaps in more modest, decent-quality places that don’t have as many amenities. I want to make sure we spread the assistance around.
To achieve both goals, less landlord abuse and more families benefiting from a fixed pot of dollars, I would suggest dramatically reducing the payment standard but also making it neighborhood-dependent. This would follow the approach of places like Los Angeles and Boston, and there are other places that have adopted these small area fair market rents. The idea is to find the fair market rent, this 40th-percentile rent, or maybe the median rent, in each zip code within the District, and then tie the payment standard to that amount. That would be a major reduction in the payment standard compared to what it currently is.
In the highest-cost zip code, which currently covers Capitol Hill and some of the close-in Northwest neighborhoods, the fair market rent is currently about $4,200 for a three-bedroom apartment. That’s a reduction compared to the $5,301 we currently have, but I think it would be a much more realistic target. You can certainly rent apartments on Capitol Hill. I’ve rented an apartment on Capitol Hill for about $3,000, for my wife, my three kids, and me. There are apartments available in these areas at much lower rates. If we set a payment standard tailored to each zip code, we could still meet the goal of letting families access these higher-cost neighborhoods, including the schools there and the proximity to employment and public transportation, but in a more cost-efficient way that would let us use those dollars to serve other families who could be afforded the same opportunity.
Greg Jaczko: And this is within the purview of the DC Housing Authority. It doesn’t require the federal government to make a change, right?
Kevin Corinth: That’s correct. The DC Housing Authority has that autonomy, so it could set a different payment standard. In their plan for the upcoming fiscal year 2027, they’ve actually proposed, or at least suggested, moving to neighborhood-specific payment standards, which I think is a good thing. But they still want to tie them to 168% of the fair market rent in each area. So while it’s good that we’d have zip code–specific payment standards, they would be, in my mind, far too high.
In the Capitol Hill zip code, I think it would be a little over $7,000 as the payment standard for a three-bedroom apartment. If you know the Capitol Hill rental market, that is very high. There are some places that go for something like that, but they’re very nice houses. It would be great if everybody could live in a really nice house, it would be amazing if we had the resources to do that, but we simply don’t. This is a fixed pot of federal funds, in some cases supplemented by local funds, and most families aren’t getting anything at all. It would be much better to have reasonable payment standards tailored to about the middle of the rent distribution in each zip code, and then let families rent apartments up to that amount instead of up to these much higher payment standards.
Greg Jaczko: In your analysis, did you look at, say, 120% of the fair market rent and determine how many more families, or what percentage more, might be able to get into the program?
Kevin Corinth: Unfortunately, we have a data availability problem, and that’s one I’m hoping to tackle in future work. The DC Housing Authority doesn’t publish the full distribution of property-level rents among voucher holders. We really want to know how many voucher holders are renting apartments at or near the payment standard. Many are not, right? No one is claiming that every family with a voucher is renting an apartment at the $5,300 payment standard for a three-bedroom. But the limited data I’ve seen suggests that many families are renting apartments above at least the fair market rent of each zip code. What that tells me is that you could serve more families by adopting these lower payment standards. But we won’t know exactly how many until we can get that property-level data, where we’d know the contract rent for each unit, to answer the question precisely.
Greg Jaczko: So your solution is a twin approach: reducing the percentage and moving to a neighborhood-specific fair market rent. Combined, you think those would expand the program to more families while still giving families the opportunity to live in the more desirable neighborhoods that offer better schools, better services, and all of those things?
Kevin Corinth: Exactly. And there’s actually research on this, looking at what happens when a city maintains a high payment standard versus adopting these small area fair market rents, where the payment standard varies across neighborhoods. What researchers find is that you actually get more movement of low-income families to high-opportunity areas with small area fair market rents than with uniformly high payment standards. So I think you could not only serve more families but also do a better job of getting low-income families into some of the higher-cost, potentially higher-opportunity neighborhoods.
Greg Jaczko: Okay, we’ve covered a lot, and I think this has been a really great explanation of the program. Is there anything else you wanted to add before we wrap up?
Kevin Corinth: Only to wish us godspeed on getting better data, and then hopefully we can follow up with you soon once we have a better idea of exactly how many families these solutions could serve.
Greg Jaczko: And I might add, before we wrap up: we have an election in a week and a half, and we’ll have a lot of changes in DC government. What do you see as the prospects for a potential new mayor or new City Council looking at these issues and considering some of the ideas you’ve presented?
Kevin Corinth: I’m always hopeful. I think our likely new mayor, the Democratic candidate, seems attuned to the problems with the voucher program and wants to make sure we’re not overpaying landlords and that we can serve more families. I’m sure I’m not going to agree with everything they do in every area, but I think this is an area where common sense would dictate lowering the payment standard, making it neighborhood-specific, and serving more families. So I’m hopeful the incoming mayoral administration and the City Council together can arrive at something more reasonable.
Greg Jaczko: Well, thank you for those thoughts. Hopefully they’ll get you the new data you’re looking for, and when you have it, hopefully you’ll put it together and share it with all our readers here at Capital Commonsense.
Kevin Corinth: Will do.
Greg Jaczko: Well, thank you, Kevin. That was Kevin Corinth talking about DC’s voucher payment standards and the DC housing voucher program. Thank you for joining us, Kevin, and sharing your thoughts on these ideas. You can read Kevin’s full analysis on our Substack, Capital Commonsense. Go there to see all his numbers, lots of graphs, and all the analysis behind the conversation. And remember, everyone: subscribe, share this episode, and tell us what you think. I’m Greg Jaczko. Thanks for listening. This has been the Capital Commonsense Podcast.
