The Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency has since closed its waitlist for new applicants due to long wait times and a lack of funding.
It was a devastating blow, Stowe said. As a single parent, she doesn’t make enough money to pay rent on her own.
“I was really relying on that opportunity and thinking that my day is getting closer and closer,” Stowe said.
Stowe was one of nearly 16,000 people on the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency’s waitlist for Housing Choice vouchers in 2023, also known as Section 8. The federally-funded agency — which facilitates rental housing programs throughout the state — closed its waitlist in October 2023. Mary Hoock, director of rental assistance for the agency, said the waitlist will not reopen any time soon. The agency would need enough funding to support new clients for that to happen, Hoock told The Frontier.
The agency is projected to have a shortfall of around $8 million by the end of the year, Hoock said. This will be only the second time the agency has fallen short since its establishment in 1975. Last year, there was a deficit of a little over $2 million.
At least three other housing agencies in Oklahoma are in a budget shortfall or expect to have one by the end of the year, including Norman and Oklahoma City.
As of mid-September, approximately a fifth of the public housing authorities across the nation were facing budget shortfalls for federally-funded housing vouchers.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates the housing authorities have a combined shortfall of about $400 million this year.
Inflation, skyrocketing rent and a lack of affordable housing options have put a strain on federal voucher funding.
‘No housing for you’
Even before the shortfall, the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency had only enough funding to help applicants with priority status for vouchers because of homelessness or disability. The number of people on the waitlist is the highest it’s been since 2018. Of those, over 800 have priority status.
It’s been months since the Norman-based nonprofit Food and Shelter could secure housing for one of its clients because of the lack of funding for vouchers, said April Doshier, executive director of Food and Shelter. Norman’s 52-bed overnight shelter, which was until recently operated by Food and Shelter, consistently reaches capacity. Doshier said they turn away anywhere from 12 to 15 people a night.
“There’s nowhere to send them,” Doshier told The Frontier. “It’s a really terrible thing to have to tell somebody, ‘I hear that you want to apply for housing, but there is no housing for you.’”
Even when housing agencies accept voucher applications, Anden Bull, the chief operating officer at Palomar, which helps victims of domestic violence in Oklahoma City, said the lengthy waitlists make it difficult to place clients in housing.
“The waitlist is so long,” Anden said. “When you’re fleeing with your family, you really don’t have 18 months to spare.”
Lack of federal funding
The Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency has closed its waitlist five times since 2002 due to long wait times and a lack of federal funding. Some applicants had been waiting for housing vouchers for three years when the agency last closed its waitlist in 2023.
Each year, Congress appropriates funding for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to be funneled to public housing authorities across the country. The department then decides how much funding to give to individual housing authorities.
Rent spikes have contributed to the gap in funding this year, said Tushar Gurjal, a senior policy manager at the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, a group that represents public housing authorities.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development budget proposal to Congress is based on the previous year’s budget and market predictions. Gurjal said the department expected the post-pandemic rent markups to level out more than they did.
“Their forecast was a little bit off,” Gurjal said. “And because the forecast that HUD provided to Congress was a little bit off, what Congress allocated for funding was a little bit lower than anticipated.”
The Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency received nearly $74 million in federal housing money for 2024. But funding isn’t keeping up with rising housing costs.
As of October, the agency spent about $26 million more in 2024 to administer approximately the same number of vouchers it had in 2015.
“Even with the amount of funding they indicate they will give us, it’s only a percentage of what we truly need,” Hoock said.
Rising rent
Participants in the Section 8 program are required to pay a third of their income toward rent, while a housing voucher covers the rest. But in the years following the pandemic, rent skyrocketed while wages increased only slightly. Oklahoma’s minimum wage hasn’t strayed from $7.25 an hour since 2009. At that rate, a person would have to work 110 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom apartment.
Greg Burge, professor of economics at the University of Oklahoma, said an average two-bedroom apartment is about 25% to 30% more today than in 2020. Between 2020 and 2023, the average annual wage increased by just 13%.
“Your budget isn’t 30% bigger,” Burge said. “But your rent is 30% more.”
Vouchers now cover a much larger portion of participants’ rent than they did even a year ago. This year, Hoock said the price of units participating in Section 8 has jumped by over 10% and is projected to reach nearly 15%.
A spokesperson for the Tulsa Housing Authority said the agency saw a 360% increase in landlords requesting increased rents for their units on the Section 8 program between 2022 and 2023.
There are several reasons behind rising rent. Increased insurance costs and inflated prices of materials have made it more expensive to build and maintain a property, so many developers are forced to increase rent to offset these costs while still bringing in a profit, said Dan Emmanuel, a research manager at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Nationwide, a lack of affordable housing has left many people cost-burdened — meaning they spend 30% of their income or more on rent, Emmanuel said.
“This is a systemic issue,” Emmanuel said. “It just became a lot more acute.”
Public housing authorities across the country are closing their waitlists as a result. Even before the shortfall, funding was only enough to serve roughly a quarter of households in need.
Closing the gap
The Department of Housing and Urban Development is offsetting some of the budget gap by giving agencies with additional reserves less funding and using that to pay more to agencies that have a shortage of funds.
Federal officials are monitoring the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency’s expenses to assess how much funding is needed to ensure payments are made for existing clients who have vouchers.
Supplemental federal money will keep the agency funded through the end of the year, Hoock said. She’s unsure what next year’s funding will be, or when the agency will reopen its waitlist.
In the meantime, families like Stowe’s are left in limbo, wondering when their vouchers will arrive — if at all.
Stowe worries she won’t be able to find an affordable place to live in a neighborhood where her family feels safe.
“I’m just really scared about where I’m going to be moving next,” Stowe said. “I don’t want to fear that if my kids are outside playing, they’re going to accidentally get shot because somebody’s doing a drive-by.”
Stowe, 31, has experienced homelessness off and on for over a decade as she struggled with drug addiction. But she turned her life around in 2021 when she began drug treatment, hoping to give her kids the stable life she never had. She’s been sober for nearly four years.
She lost her job in May after spending nine weeks in the hospital and getting open-heart surgery to treat an infection in her heart valve. She’s relying on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families while she looks for a new job and has applied again for a housing voucher with the Oklahoma City Housing Authority, which runs affordable housing programs for the city. It can be up to a three-year wait for applicants to receive a voucher from the Oklahoma City Housing Authority.
Her application is still pending.
