The lawsuit comes amid a rocky week for the HUD secretary A collection of civil rights groups is suing the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, along with its secretary, Ben Carson, over the delay of a housing voucher rule designed to combat segregation among those who use ?Section 8? vouchers to subsidize their rent.
Open Communities Alliance, a Connecticut nonprofit that advocates for ?interracial access to opportunity and housing choice,? filed the lawsuit on behalf of plaintiffs Crystal Carter and Tiara Moore over Carson?s decision to push back mandatory implementation of the Small Area Fair Market Rent (SAFMR) rule by two years.
Originally set to take effect on January 1, 2018, SAFMR aims to give housing voucher users greater choice in where they live. Currently, the vouchers subsidize rent payments above about 30 percent of voucher recipients? income. The subsidy, however, is capped by a ?fair market rent? rate calculated by HUD by averaging the rent across the entire metropolitan area in which the voucher user lives. But because rents vary dramatically over any given metro area and are typically lower along the perimeter, the average is driven down and the subsidy ends up being too low to cover rent except in areas that are impoverished. The SAFMR rule recalculates the fair market rent on the basis of a nearby zip code, which raises the fair market rent and, thus, the subsidy. This gives voucher users the opportunity to move to a better neighborhoo...