HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Housing (PIH) has created a Small Area Fair Market Rent (SAFMR or Small Area FMR) website. The highlight of the new Small Area FMR website is an SAFMR dashboard showing which public housing agencies (PHAs) are using SAFMRs and how many Housing Choice Voucher units are impacted for each PHA. The dashboard will be updated monthly.
Small Area FMRs reflect rents for U.S. Postal ZIP Codes, while traditional Fair Market Rents (FMRs) reflect a single rent standard for an entire metropolitan region – which can contain many counties. The value of an HCV is determined by the “payment standard” chosen by a PHA; in general, an HCV payment standard is between 90% and 110% of the FMR. The intent of SAFMRs is to provide voucher payment standards that are more in line with neighborhood-scale rental markets, resulting in relatively higher subsidies in neighborhoods with higher rents and greater opportunities, and lower subsidies in neighborhoods with lower rents and concentrations of voucher holders. A goal of Small Area FMRs is to help households use vouchers in more well-resourced areas with lower poverty levels, thereby reducing voucher concentrations in high-poverty areas. The November 16, 2016, final SAFMR rule mandates use of Small Area FMRs by PHAs in 24 metropolitan areas. That rule also allows PHAs to voluntarily use SAFMRs to “Opt-in.”
The dashboard shows that currently, 192 PHAs with 537,737 HCV units are required to use SAFMRs. Only 11 PHAs with 35,943 HCV units have voluntarily opted to use SAFMRs. The HCV regulations allow a PHA to establish a payment standard up to 110% of the Small Area FMR. The dashboard shows that 60 PHAs with 395,232 HCV units use SAFMRs as exception payment standards (EPS) in some of their ZIP Codes. The dashboard might overcount EPS vouchers because HUD assumes all HCV units within an EPS PHA use a Small Area FMR. Click on the EPS and Opt-in bar graphs to search for EPS or Opt-in PHAs.
The dashboard shows there are 968,910 HCV units in SAFMR areas nationally. In Illinois, for example, the dashboard shows there are 14 PHAs with 87,705 HCV units using SAFMRs. The Chicago Housing Authority has 59,230 HCV units while the Housing Authority of Joliet, for instance, has 2,423 HCV units. The 14 PHAs indicated as “mandatory” on the dashboard are all in the Chicago metropolitan area and are therefore required by the final rule to use Small Area FMRs. Three PHAs in Alabama entailing 8,235 HCV units are using SAFMRs as exception payment standards in some of their ZIP Codes, thereby improving HCV households’ opportunities to use a voucher in more well-resourced areas where rents are higher.
The SAFMR website also includes the Small Area FMR regulation, a 2018 guidance notice, a series of training videos, and links to HUD’s Policy Development and Research (PD&R) webpage containing actual Small Area FMRs by bedroom size for each ZIP code in a PHA’s service area.
The new Small Area FMR website is available at: https://tinyurl.com/mrxche5m
Information about the Housing Choice Voucher program is on page 4-1 of NLIHC’s 2023 Advocates’ Guide.