HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Housing (PIH) has enhanced the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Data Dashboard to help public housing agencies (PHAs) maximize the impact of their HCV programs. The updated dashboard will also be useful for resident leaders and advocates. The dashboard will now showcase key HCV leasing and budget utilization statistics at the national, state, and PHA level.
The dashboard includes the following aggregate data points: budget and leasing utilization, reserve balances, program attrition and new admissions, per unit cost trends, project-based voucher portfolio, leasing potential, and special purpose voucher utilization. The dashboard will also allow users to compare metrics for different PHAs side by side. In addition, all data will be available at the individual PHA level and will include Moving to Work (MTW) agencies.
During a call with stakeholders, PIH staff described various features, including “leasing potential,” which is the number of additional vouchers a PHA could lease for a full 12 months while maintaining reserves as a percentage of budget authority, based on PHA size. For PHAs with 500 or more units, the desired reserve size is 12%. For PHAs with between 250 and 500 vouchers the desired reserve size is 6%, and for PHAs with fewer than 250 vouchers the desired reserve is 4%. The percent of total vouchers with leasing potential is the leasing potential divided by the total program units under a PHA’s annual contribution contract (ACC).
Currently, the national leasing potential is 95,500 units, meaning that 95,500 vouchers are not available to households who need them. PIH has set a goal of reducing that to 45,000 units. For a more specific example, the Housing Authority of the City of Milwaukee is among the top ten PHAs with leasing potential. Milwaukee currently has the potential to lease 2,229 more vouchers, representing 29.5% of all of its voucher authority. The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles is also among the top ten, but its leasing potential is 3,588 unused vouchers, representing 7% of its voucher authority.
The updated dashboard, along with a tutorial on how to use the dashboard and an extensive user guide and data dictionary, is available at: https://bit.ly/3vu67zJ
Questions or suggestions on how to improve the dashboard can be sent to [email protected], an account that is routinely monitored by the developer of the tool.
More information about the HCV program is on page 4-1 of NLIHC’s 2021 Advocates’ Guide.