The House Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance will hold a hearing on the “effectiveness of HUD’s Moving to Work program” on June 26. HUD’s Moving to Work (MTW) program, which provides a small set of public housing agencies waivers from most key public housing and housing choice voucher program requirements. NLIHC has long opposed expansion of MTW without attention to concerns about MTW agencies that raise rents, impose work requirements, impose time limits, divert resources from actual housing assistance, and other actions that may adversely affect tenants.
In 2012, NLIHC, HUD, and other national organizations hammered out a “stakeholder agreement” on MTW expansion, which was included in a draft House rental housing reform bill in April 2012. The stakeholder agreement would allow for an MTW expansion, but only with strict protections and safeguards for residents and the future availability of housing assistance in general.
Because the overall rental housing reform bill would provide billions in savings for HUD’s main rental assistance programs, there is great interest in passing the overall bill. But there is also interest to include some expansion of MTW within the overall bill. It is unclear if the 2012 stakeholder agreement would hold in any new legislation.
NLIHC testified twice during the 112th Congress, once before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Insurance, Housing and Community Opportunity (see Memo, 6/24/2011) and again before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Subcommittee on Housing, Transportation and Community Development (see Memo, 8/3/2012), on the potential dangers to tenants of expanding the number of MTW sites without significant changes to the current MTW program, which provides very few protections to tenants.
The June 26 hearing will be at 2 pm ET in room 2128 of the Rayburn House office building. Witnesses have not yet been announced.
Access the 2012 stakeholder agreement on expanding the MTW program at: http://bit.ly/11uDjHc
Read the Moving to Work Demonstration Program chapter (page 174) in NLIHC’s Advocates’ Guide at: http://bit.ly/18L9So8