HUD Checks The Rent Math And Decides To Divide The Family

HUD has published a rule requiring public-housing residents to prove citizenship or eligible immigration status, potentially displacing mixed-status families. Secretary Scott Turner presents this as stopping ineligible people from exploiting federal aid. There is an inconvenient little detail: the aid was already divided according to eligibility.

Since 1995, those families could live together while subsidies covered only eligible members. Experts told CBS News that this meant paying a higher share of rent. The government had discovered fractions. Thursday, the government decided that perhaps the family should be divisible too.

The accounting question was who received the subsidy. The new question is who gets to keep living together. That is quite a leap for a department whose name includes housing.

The rule is scheduled to take effect December 14. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that roughly 80,000 people could be affected, including about 37,000 children, mostly citizens. Those are projected risks, not evictions that have already occurred. But the possibility of losing a home doesn’t become reassuring because the spreadsheet is labeled forecast.

Turner says an audit found nearly 200,000 tenants with incomplete or unverified eligibility. Unverified is not the same thing as ineligible, much less proven fraud. Missing paperwork is not a magic prosecutorial wand. You cannot wave a folder and turn everyone inside it into a scam.

He also invokes eligible Americans stuck on housing waitlists. That need is real. So are the eligible people inside these households. Apparently the policy has discovered a way for citizens to appear on both sides of its own sales pitch.

Housing lawyer Marie Claire Tran-Leung warns that departures could also create HUD funding shortfalls. Wonderful: a crackdown that may lose rent while making families less secure.

We had a fraction that kept people housed. Now we have a whole lot of trouble.