Abstract
This research paper looks at some of the loopholes of the various Rental Housing Assistance programs offered by the government to help families that cannot afford to live to pay their rent. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) oversees the three major programs offered by the federal government, i.e. public housing, privately owned subsidized housing and housing choice voucher (section-8). This paper doesn't focus on one of them specifically, but rather on the efficiency of the overall programs. The loopholes and inefficiencies addressed in this paper relate to the eligibility requirement, the lack of coordination across the various programs, their portability, the lack of incentives, and their perception across the indutry.
Keywords: HUD, government, Section 8, housing, assistance, rental

Are Government Rental Housing Assistance Programs Fulfilling their Social Mandate?
Government Rental Housing Assistance has three programs to help low income families with their housing: public housing, privately owned subsidized housing, and housing choice voucher programs, the latter popularly known as Section-8. These programs are the result of a long process that started a hundred and fifty years ago with the Civil Rights Act of 1866. However, while the Civil Rights Act of 1866 established the conceptual foundations for fair housing policies, the country was still left without mechanisms to unable a fair housing market. It is only in the 1960's first federal structure really started taking place. President Lyndon Johnson had already founded the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and introduced the Fair Housing Act, which made it illegal to refuse to rent because of the individual's background. While the programs were introduced to for very noble reasons there is still a lot to do as loopholes are too often exploited, which prevents the programs purpose to be fully achieved. Nowadays, these government rental housing assistance programs assist millions of households to afford safe and acceptable private housing, most of them through Section-8 vouchers. Without knowing the details and the actual outcomes of the programs, people could think that the overall benefits overcome situations where the program is taken advantage of. The voting public tends to see other priorities, such as infrastructure, national security, or job creation, as more important, which pushes the fair housing topic to the sidelines. While it is important to support programs that aim at greater fairness across classes, it is as critical to ensure they are and remain efficient. Efficiency here can be seen as twofold: targeting the right audience and implementing the right incentives–and this is where the programs deceive. There are a multitude of factors that should be assessed in order to find ways to optimize our current federal assistance structure. The Department of Housing and Urban Development should close loopholes and incorporate incentives so that the right people are being helped, and in a way that promotes life conditions improvement instead of government dependency.
The enter/exit criteria of the program

Many would argue the assistance doesn’t always go to the ones needing it the most, and there seems to be at least two ways to look at it. First, there is the idea that the programs may not be in line anymore with the needs of a society. The Section-8 voucher assistance structure, for example, defines eligibility as earning less than eighty percent of the median income for a given neighborhood (Landis & McClure, 2010, 340). In Cook County for 2014, such a figure equates to $40,550 per year for a single individual (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2013). Everything else being equal, an Illinois resident working at or slightly above minimum wage would therefore receive the same priority as someone who has no financial revenue whatsoever. While earning a salary can of course not be a disqualifier, eighty percent of the median may not be the appropriate line to define eligibility and target the right population. Some would also raise concerns about relying primarily on income as driver for eligibility, claiming that the application review process should be more holistic, by not only including income, but also assets such as savings and certificates of deposit. If implemented appropriately, this could close loopholes and prevent wealthy yet low income individuals from consuming the scarce voucher-sponsored rental opportunities that would have otherwise helped individuals genuinely in need of financial support.
Lack of coordination across the programs The multiple programs offered by the government are administered by different authorities within The Department of Urban and Housing Development. Applications to these assistance programs are managed separately. For example, the section 8 program is administered by the office of Housing Choice Vouchers, whereas Public Housing is managed by the various local housing agencies (HAs). Individuals can and typically do apply to the two types of programs simultaneously and may end up receiving both assistance despite the fact that waiting lists are long. Instead of distributing the federal assistance across a wider audience, the current structure allocates it in disproportionate ways. In order to prevent this from happening, and therefore guarantee that aid is provided to a larger number of individuals in need, the administrators of the programs should communicate with each other as to ensure the proper allocation of resources across the targeted population. This could be as simple as designing a joint application process so that authorities can collectively define the outcome of the requests that have been submitted.
Portability
Another area that requires to be changed is the portability part of the program. Portability in this case is defined as the ability to transfer a voucher to be used in a different jurisdiction. Potential participants can leverage the portability mechanism to take part of the program in a different area where vouchers are available. This program was established to allow its participants to move to safer neighborhoods with more employment opportunities. Unfortunately, portability is often used by program participants to move back to their former neighborhood despite higher crime rates and lack of job opportunities. Add citation (Tomlin, D., 2004, p. 7). This is in fact going against what the portability program was created for, which was to offer access to better and safer environments. In order to address these problems and make the programs more efficient, more vouchers should be offered in safer neighborhoods that provide greater job opportunities or have good schools. Ideally, portability should be designed so that participants would not relocate to neighborhoods with less opportunities, apart from cases of force majeure or exceptional circumstances, whether they relate to family, work, or school. Hopefully, such changes will prevent current participants from moving to neighborhoods where there might not be opportunities for prosperity.
Incentives
The reality of these housing programs is that they create and maintain dependency on government assistance. The assistance works so that people live life as if pay check to pay check. The programs are not designed to promote behaviors that would work towards financial self- sufficiency. As a result, the lack of such incentives is actually leading to the opposite effect, in the sense that participants end up being better off by making sure they do not earn more than the limit imposed by the assistance program requirements. In other words, given the program framework, the participants are left facing the question of why getting a better job if in the end the extra income they would earn goes towards a rent that would have anyway been paid otherwise. Ways of optimizing the existing structure would relate to designing such assistance programs to serve longer term objectives for life improvement. However, for this to be effective there would need to be well-thought incentives, aiming at supporting participants on their way to financial independence. This means that the programs should be built so that they allow rather than prevent individuals from willing to achieve higher life standards.
Change of Perception There is a general perception around the programs that defines them as either broken, unfair, failing, or to be taken advantage of. These programs hardly get the support that is needed to be successful from all the parties involved, whether they are landlords taking part in the programs, administrators of HUD, local housing agencies, and more importantly, the participants themselves. Even if we where to fix the issues around eligibility, portability, and government dependency, the programs will still remain inefficient if such a transformation is not supported by a change strategy that fosters buy-in throughout the industry for the new solution.
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Conclusion As previously mentioned, there are a multitude of factors that should be assessed for optimization in order to turn the government rental housing assistance programs into mechanisms that effectively help individuals reach a higher quality of life. Ensuring that eligibility requirements are designed to target the right audience is one of them. For the federal assistance to become more efficient, we would also need better coordination across the various programs as to properly allocate the limited resources to a wider range of households in need of financial help. This construct would need to rely on a portability model that works in favor of life improvement, not the opposite. Maybe more importantly, these rental programs would need to include incentives so that participants seek financial independence instead of remaining dependent on the federal assistance. Such optimization, however, cannot be enabled without a change management strategy aiming at overcoming the current negative perception of the program. Hopefully, all these changes would help individuals reach better life conditions, gain financial self-sufficiency, and therefore allow for their exits of the programs so that the same assistance can be used to help the next wave of participants.

References
Landis, J. D., & McClure, K. (2010). Rethinking Federal Housing Policy. Journal Of The American Planning Association, 76(3), 319-348. doi:10.1080/01944363.2010.484793, p. 340
Tomlin, D. (2004). The Evolution and Future of the Section 8 Program. Journal Of Housing & Community Development, 61(4), 6-8.
U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development (2013, November). HUD/USA. Retrieved April 2014, from http://www.huduser.org/portal/datasets/il/il2014/select_Geography.odn