It went up by how much?
That was the response of Housing Authority of New Haven board Chairman Jason Turner when he learned that the fair market rent in New Haven has risen a whopping 8.5 percent since last year.
Turner learned the information at last week’s monthly HANH board meeting. The news meant that the housing authority will be paying landlords more for housing families with federal subsidies — and therefore will have fewer such Section 8 subsidies to hand out.
New Haven and other cities use fair market rent calculations — which are published by the federal department of Housing and Urban Development every year — to determine who qualifies for Section 8 housing.
Last year, the FMR for a 3‑bedroom apartment in New Haven was $1,491/month. Starting next month, it will be about $1,618/month.
“Is this normal?” the chairman asked dubiously during the meeting. “I mean, does the rent normally go up this much?”
Not exactly, although rent has been steadily increasing since 2009. (Before that it actually went down slightly, in the height of the foreclosure crisis.) But in the past few years a 3‑bedroom has gone up by around $100 or less, unlike this year.
The housing authority can subsidize apartments that go for up to 110 percent of the fair market rent. So that would be roughly $1,780 for a three-bedroom. Technically, more families who meet the income requirements for Section 8 (you must be at or below 80 percent of the area median income, around $64,000 for a family of four) might have an easier time finding a qualifying apartment once the new rates go into effect.
But the federal government isn’t giving the city any extra money to pay for them. In fact, it may well be giving the city even less.
Thomas MacMillan File Photo
“Everybody’s getting less,” said Karen DuBois-Walton (pictured), the housing authority’s executive director. Then she self-corrected: “Everybody’s getting slashed.”
The change in fair market rent in itself wasn’t so bad, DuBois-Walton said. “We could have probably absorbed it.” But if Congress goes through with hacking away at the president’s health appropriations bill, the city’s budget for its Housing Choice Voucher program (one of the main Section 8 housing programs) could go down as much as 15 percent.
Currently, New Haven gets over $50 million for the program and subsidizes more than 4,000 apartments. None of those will have to be taken away if funding shrinks, said DuBois-Walton, but “it just limits how many new people can come on board.”
HUD has proposed the following fair market rents for the New Haven-Meriden metro area starting this October: $987 for an efficiency, $1119 for a one-bedroom, $1352 for a two-bedroom, $1618 for a three-bedroom and $1850 for a four-bedroom. Click here to read more about HUD’s fair market rent documentation system and to compare the new rents with last year.
Meanwhile, the total income of the top 400 Americans increased by 12% last year. That's equivalent to $1.5 trillion.