A $5 billion pot of federal money set aside to help people on the verge of homelessness pay the rent is running out of cash — and no one has a plan to keep the roughly 60,000 renters, more than 15,000 of them in California — from losing their housing after the last dollar is spent.
News of the imminent expiration of the Emergency Housing Voucher program came in a March 6 letter the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sent to local public housing authorities, the agencies that administer federal rental housing assistance programs.
A final payment this spring may allow some agencies to keep their emergency programs running into 2026, the letter reads. But housing authorities were advised to move forward with “the expectation that no additional funding from HUD will be forthcoming.”
For the housing authority staff who received the letter, it remains unclear whether the program is winding down simply because it has run out of funds on its own accord or whether it represents a policy shift from the Trump administration, which has been on an aggressive and often uncoordinated cost cutting tear across the federal bureaucracy.
The letter came as a shock to Lisa Jones, CEO of the San Diego Housing Commission. Jones said the commission could conceivably pay its share of the rent for the nearly 400 San Diego renters currently assisted by the program through December. After that, she could think of no obvious way to make up for the missing federal dollars.
Jones spoke to CalMatters from Washington D.C., where the heads of housing authorities across the country had gathered for a conference and to lobby their representatives. As news of the end of the program has spread among her counterparts, “a quiet panic” has set in, she said.
Absent federal…
Read the full article here
