Tiara Booker was striking out. She had been looking for months for a place to live using her housing voucher, and she was facing the public housing authority’s deadline to lease a unit with the voucher. She and her two children had to couch-surf and sleep in her car as she searched.
She said landlords either requested higher rent payments than the voucher allowed or wouldn’t accept her voucher, which she considered discrimination based on her source of income and/or her race.
Booker ended up losing her housing voucher for a couple of hours. But in what she calls a “miracle,” a landlord called her back and said she would accept it. The Lake County Housing Authority gave her back the voucher. Booker said she would have been “broken” if she had lost it.
“I could survive, but my kids … having to look at them and listen to them cry and their concerns and their wishes and their hopes and sit there with nothing to offer them,” Booker said. “That would have been a different type of hurt.”
Booker is not alone in her struggles to find housing with a voucher.
From the tiny North Chicago Housing Authority to the behemoth Chicago Housing Authority, local housing agencies are seeing their voucher recipients struggle and fail to find housing.
The vast majority of vouchers come through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Housing Choice Voucher Program and are doled out to local public housing authorities. Formerly known as Section 8, the nation’s primary subsidized housing program allows housing authorities to provide subsidies to low-income residents to find housing in the private market. Voucher holders typically pay about 30% of their income toward rent, with housing authorities covering the rest.
The multi-billion-dollar program helps more than 2 million households nationwide and is needed at a time when housing, particularly affordable housing, is scarce in Illinois and across the country. It can take years, sometimes decades, to get off the waitlist for a housing voucher.
Voucher recipients are failing to find housing for numerous reasons, according to experts, public housing authorities, landlords and renters.
In Illinois, the majority of voucher holders are Black, as the Black population has historically faced racial discrimination preventing them from building wealth, making them more likely to use vouchers. Because of this, advocates say some of the barriers voucher recipients face in finding housing is racial discrimination, too.
Voucher recipients get 120 days to lease a unit, per HUD policy, with extensions granted on a case-by-case basis, according to the housing authorities that spoke with the Tribune. While the agencies keep lists of available units and can recommend outside organizations that can help with housing searches, the authorities themselves do not have enough staff to aid all voucher recipients in their search, they said.
Nina Chalmers, executive director of the North Chicago Housing Authority, said low lease-up rates are becoming an “epidemic” across the country.
“I don’t know where (the program) is going.”
HUD did not respond to a Tribune request for comment.
CHA’s focus elsewhere
The Chicago Housing Authority, which has more than 52,000 Housing Choice vouchers and nearly 3,500 vouchers through other HUD programs, does not actively monitor how many people are able to lease units with vouchers it provides and instead focuses on how many vouchers in the agency’s possession are in use, according to Cheryl Burns, CHA’s head of the Housing Choice Voucher Program.
The CHA has seen 61% to 77% of its voucher recipients able to lease a unit from 2019 to 2022. The rates are lower for 2023 and 2024, 45% and 31%, respectively, but CHA said that’s because some of those recipients are still searching for units to rent. CHA’s data includes voucher recipients outside the Housing Choice Voucher Program.
CHA data are consistent with national figures. Only 60% of voucher holders are able to use them to lease homes, according to a 2024 national study conducted with data from 2015 to 2019 by New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. The numbers are worse for markets with an older housing stock and for voucher recipients of color, the study says, both of which apply to Chicago.
Many people involved in the voucher program have poor credit or no credit, as well as eviction records, Burns said, which makes it more difficult to find housing.
Landlords also don’t always count a recipient’s voucher toward their income, which can result in not meeting landlords’ income requirements. The CHA helps voucher recipients respond to landlords in that circumstance, Burns said. Advocates argue that not counting a voucher toward the income requirement is discrimination.
While the lease-up rates are low, about 99% of CHA’s Housing Choice vouchers allocated by HUD are in use as voucher holders try to find homes. That means CHA is using its federal dollars, said Burns, who has been in her role since 2019.
“(We are) focused more on helping families rather than increasing lease-up rates,” Burns said.
Lake County collaboration
The Waukegan Housing Authority, North Chicago Housing Authority and Lake County Housing Authority entered into an agreement late last year allowing their voucher holders to lease units in any of their jurisdictions in an effort to expand housing options and, in turn, increase lease-up rates for voucher recipients.
Typically, in order to lease a unit with a voucher in a different jurisdiction, a resident would have to “port out,” a HUD policy that requires additional paperwork and changes in case managers.
The North Chicago agency, which has about 540 Housing Choice Vouchers, has seen a range of 31% to 66% of voucher recipients able to lease units between 2019 and 2024. In 2024 the rate was 50%, although some recipients are still looking for places to lease.
Chalmers, the executive director of the North Chicago Housing Authority, said she has seen the agency’s lease-up rates decline in her 24-year tenure. The city of North Chicago’s housing stock has not been well maintained and has shifted from rentals to for-sale homes, she said.
“I am from the same community, so I have seen it grow; I have seen it decline,” Chalmers said. “There were a lot of apartment complexes in the city, and a lot of those are either abandoned or their landlords just don’t want to do the upkeep that it takes to remain in the program.”
While residents now have more housing options because of the partnership with Lake County and Waukegan, Chalmers said many are hesitant to move to a different community.
The housing authority also set up a meeting for local landlords to learn about the program with the goal of getting more to rent to voucher holders, but Chalmers said it wasn’t successful in attracting more participation. She hopes HUD will allow her agency to provide monetary incentives to landlords to help encourage them to participate in the program.
The Waukegan and Lake County authorities have already received HUD’s approval to offer landlords incentives.
Charles Chambers Jr., the CEO of Waukegan’s agency, which has about 675 Housing Choice Vouchers and 225 vouchers through other HUD programs, noticed lease-up rates starting to dip during the COVID-19 pandemic and began working with HUD. The agency’s annual lease-up rates ranged from 28% to 55% between 2019 and 2022. In 2023, the rate jumped to 77%. In 2024 the rate was 17%, but some people are still searching for housing. These rates include voucher recipients outside of the Housing Choice Voucher Program.
Chambers, who has been in his role since 2011, said the decline in lease-up rates stemmed from a lack of available housing units as well as difficulties getting new landlords to join the program after many experienced tough times during the pandemic era eviction moratoria.
Now, lease-up rates are improving, Chambers said, thanks to the expanded jurisdiction and the recruitment of new landlords with the help of monetary incentives, which began around 2023.
“The future for us is looking very bright now,” Chambers said.
To make the future even brighter, Chambers would have HUD provide a pool of money for landlords to repair tenant-caused damage help incentivize more to participate in the Housing Choice Voucher Program. Washington State launched a fund like that in 2018.
The Lake County Housing Authority, which has about 3,200 vouchers, the bulk of which are for the Housing Choice Voucher Program, saw program lease-up rates range from 52% to 66.5% between 2020 and 2024. In 2024 the rate was 62%, with some recipients still searching for housing.
Lorraine Hocker, executive director of the Lake County agency since 2018, cited the lack of available and affordable housing units, the large need for supportive services in addition to housing and hesitant landlords — all challenges exacerbated by the pandemic — as some of the reasons for voucher recipients’ struggles.
Hocker noted that from 2022 through the first half of 2024, the agency was not letting as many vouchers expire as usual given all the increased difficulties.
The agency’s landlord incentive program, which started in October 2022, has encouraged landlords to rent to voucher recipients, Hocker said. The authority also hired a landlord liaison for the first time in November 2022 to coordinate with landlords and aid in people’s housing searches. At the national level, HUD’s larger-than-normal increase in 2023 in how much rent the agency can offer landlords for someone with a voucher helped too, Hocker said.
For Ingrid Ellen, the lead researcher for the NYU report on national lease-up rates, improving the voucher program falls into three buckets: outlawing and enforcing source of income discrimination, providing further support to tenants and making the program easier for landlords.
“The voucher program provides incredible benefits to households that are able to use their vouchers,” Ellen said. “But (the research) does suggest thinking hard about ways to make the program easier to use both by landlords and by tenants.”
Housing providers weigh in
Public housing authorities’ bureaucratic processes and lengthy inspections discourage housing providers from participating in the program, property owners and managers say.
Housing authorities must inspect units before voucher holders can rent them. Landlords also must get their rent amount approved by housing agencies, which can require negotiation if the housing authorities don’t accept the initial rent amount. The extra time it takes to move a voucher holder into a unit can mean lost rental income for the property owner.
Michael Mini, executive vice president of the Chicagoland Apartment Association, a trade group that represents housing providers, said the challenge he hears about most from members related to the voucher program is the length of time it takes to lease a unit. But, Mini told the Tribune last year, his members should be complying with the source of income law.
Soh Tanaka, a manager of 45 properties in Lake County and an owner of one rental property, has rented to about five voucher holders through the three Lake County housing authorities.
He said the voucher program is “very inefficient,” as there are “a lot of hoops to jump through” with inspections and a lack of uniformity among housing authorities’ procedures. Waukegan, for example, still requires wet signatures for all paperwork, although the agency said it is evaluating electronic programs.
When renting to a voucher holder, Tanaka said, the process takes a few weeks longer.
Tyson Schutz, managing broker at a local real estate firm that manages about 800 units, said the process to rent to a voucher holder can take three months, as opposed to days for a market-rate tenant. He said his real estate agents are trained in fair housing practices, but the longer process to rent to a voucher holder makes it harder to get property owners to participate in the program.
“If you lose three months of rent for the administrative process … you may not be able to pay the bills for that apartment,” Schutz said.
Katie Fallon, a researcher at the Urban Institute, released a recent report on how voucher lease-up rates might improve if housing authorities partnered with investors who own more than 100 housing units. Those investors, she said, may be better able to withstand the longer inspection processes.
Tanaka said the rental process should be streamlined for all housing authorities. Schutz said the approval process should get down to 48 hours.
“Why would it take three months to approve an application for a voucher holder when it takes me 24 hours for a market tenant?” Schutz said.
Booker finds ‘paradise’
After the initial apartment she found was infested with mice, Booker, the woman who nearly lost her voucher permanently, said she is now happily settled with her 11-year-old and 5-year-old in Gurnee in what she calls “paradise.”
For the optician, the voucher has provided stability, something she has not always experienced because her parents died when she was 3.
“It is a blessing to get it, but a strain and a burden to find somewhere or someone that will accept you,” Booker said.
Her advice to other voucher recipients: “Don’t give up.”
