'The voucher program’s happening’: Boston Mayor Marty Walsh announces pilot to issue city-funded housing subsidies
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh announced plans for a pilot program that offers locally funded affordable housing vouchers, the city’s first step toward implementing one of the first permanent programs of its kind in the nation. Walsh announced the pilot during his 2020 State of the City address Tuesday night at Symphony Hall. The program is one of several proposals Walsh introduced to bring relief for the city’s notoriously expensive housing market.
“For the first time in Boston’s history, we will issue city-funded rental vouchers, so more low-income families can be stable and secure,” Walsh, a Democrat, said Tuesday night during his State of the City address in Symphony Hall.
The pilot program was one of several strategies Walsh vowed to implement as part of a $500 million housing plan. About $100 million is expected to come from the city’s operating budget and capital fund. Walsh said the other $400 million will come from the sale of the Lafayette Garage and revenue from a 2% transfer tax on real estate sales of at least $2 million, though a bill to authorize such taxes hasn’t been passed yet.
Walsh said the pilot isn’t contingent on the passage of the transfer tax bill because the city plans to allocate $100 million in the first year from the operating budget and capital fund.
“The voucher program’s happening,” Walsh told reporters after his address. “We’re making a $100 million investment already.”
More than 47,000 people are on the Boston Housing Authority’s waitlist for the agency’s affordable housing programs. Walsh said the pilot program would offer hundreds of vouchers to low- and middle-income residents, though city officials said they do not have an estimate for how many would be available or when the pilot program would begin.
“Certainly, we would like to be up and running on this and in months, not years," said Sheila Dillon, the city’s chief of housing and director of the Department of Neighborhood Development.
Dillon told reporters on Monday that officials are discussing setting aside $5 million per year for the pilot program. But city officials need to work out details, including whether the assistance will be geared toward families or individuals, how recipients will be selected and what other parameters will exist.
Washington, D.C., offers a city-funded program, and several cities have city-funded voucher programs that offer temporary relief. San Francisco passed a business tax measure for homeless housing and services, which included a similar rent subsidy. The funding source isn’t available yet because the measure is stuck in litigation, said Fernando Marti, co-director of the Council of Community Housing Organizations.
If Walsh’s plan Is implemented, Boston would become one of the only cities offering a permanent city-funded program, in addition to the state and federal subsidies.
“We are looking at this as being permanent, but we’ll be looking at models. We’ll be talking to the advocates. We’ll be doing a lot of homework on this,” Dillon said.
The BHA administers about 13,500 federal housing vouchers, commonly known as Section 8. About 2,100 of those subsidize a unit, and the other 11,400 subsidize a tenant’s regardless of where the person lives, according to the agency.
Altogether, those subsidies provide affordable housing for about 29,000 low-income residents in the Greater Boston Area, according to the authority. Those figures don’t include tens of thousands more who live in public housing managed by the BHA.
The city-funded subsidies would be administered by the BHA, Dillon said.
“They’ve done an admirable job of getting as many vouchers as they can from the federal government in the last year,” Dillon said of the BHA. “Plus, they’ve gotten over 1,000 new vouchers, which is really hard to do given federal resources these days. But this is city funding.”
As federal housing funding has dropped in recent years, advocates have called for a city-funded voucher program.
“We’ve been fighting for this a long time. We’re very excited that it’s now coming to fruition,” Mel King, a well-known community organizer and a member of the City Rent Subsidy Coalition.
The coalition first proposed a city-funded voucher program in 2015.
In April 2016, nine Boston city councilors signed onto a letter calling on Walsh to include such an initiative in his fiscal 2017 budget, according to the Bay State Banner.
John LaBella, president of HouseWorks, said his company handles waitlists for hundreds of properties in the Boston area and sees more applicants who work full-time at risk of homelessness.
“The mayor’s plan will give households that work in Boston a chance to remain in the city,” he wrote in a statement. “It’s the right thing to do.”
The region’s for-sale housing market has shown signs of stabilizing, according to recent reports. Walsh attributed the trend to housing policies implemented under his administration, noting that one-quarter of new homes in the city were subsidized.
“Rents and homes are stabilizing. But they’re still too high for too many people,” Walsh said. “There’s much more work to be done.”
The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Boston is $2,590, according to a January 2020 report from Zumper, a real estate company that tracks rent prices. The report suggests Boston is the third most expensive city to rent, based on that figure, behind only San Francisco and New York.