Jun 24
2025
Uncertain prospects for rent subsidies
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A rent subsidy program that helps some 10,000 households in Erie County is bracing for cuts in federal assistance.
Two of three agencies that administer the Section 8 program have stopped issuing new vouchers, despite long waiting lists. Some agencies are calling this a “complete 180” to their previous efforts in November to provide renters with better access to apartments in the suburbs and more well-to-do neighborhoods in the city.
In January, HUD began basing Section 8 voucher awards on ZIP codes, adjusting payments to match neighborhood market conditions. That resulted in larger subsidies for rentals in affluent communities where rents are higher and lower payments in some poorer neighborhoods.
“We opened up our wait list, we got new people, we started pulling,” said Joy Tedeschi, vice president of housing programs at Belmont Housing. “We had to stop pulling, and we’re not allowed to issue any new vouchers right now.”
Tedeschi said this is the first time Belmont’s Section 8 program has been in shortfall, a term defined by HUD as having less than two months of operating expenses held in reserve. She said the agency last year had healthy reserves, but HUD reallocated some of that money to other housing authorities facing shortfalls.
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Now, agencies like Belmont must take measures to ensure cost-effective operations, which means a temporary hold on both new vouchers and increases in current subsidies if a voucher holder seeks to move to a neighborhood with higher rents. These measures are required for the agency to receive shortfall funding from HUD to help pay for existing vouchers.
“We don’t want anyone to lose a voucher who has one in hand right now, which unfortunately means we can’t give any anymore,” Tedeschi said.
Buffalo Municipal Housing Authority is also at a projected deficit, which, similar to Belmont, entails issuing a hold on issuing new vouchers and restricting voucher use in high-rent areas.
“We are considered shortfall status, and it’s because we are projected not to have enough funding by the end of year,” said Raine Schreiner, vice president of CVR Associates, the third-party firm contracted to administer the BMHA’s Section 8 program.
Schreiner also oversees a housing authority on the West Coast. She said what she’s seeing locally tracks with national trends, with HUD funding failing to keep up with rising rents.
Rents in Erie County have increased annually by an average of 7.2 percent from 2020 t0 2023, according to Census data.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomTedeschi said that because funding for the subsidies hasn’t kept pace with rising rental costs since 2011, the agency’s HUD-allocated funds cannot cover the actual cost of housing assistance, which has caused shortfalls for Belmont and BMHA.
The city’s third agency, Rental Assistance Corporation, is currently not in shortfall, executive director John McMahon told Investigative Post. The agency is not limiting where Section 8 can be used and he said they’re still approving applicants from their waitlist, though not many.
“We’re still encouraging families to move to higher-cost areas and areas of opportunity,” McMahon said.
While McMahon believes the goal of increasing the program in suburban areas is still achievable, sparse public transportation and childcare facilities can make a move outside of the city less appealing to some voucher holders.
Local agencies that administer the Section 8 program are also keeping an eye out for changes in federal funding.
President Donald Trump’s stopgap funding bill — signed earlier this year to prevent a government shutdown through September — provides $32.14 billion in funding to tenant-based rental assistance programs, a $3.6 billion increase from the previous fiscal year. Public housing agencies don’t expect that funding to keep up with the rent hikes across the nation, however.
And the Trump administration’s One Big, Beautiful Bill Act threatens Section 8 and affordable housing funding with a $26 billion cut, which Tedeschi expects to cause further backlogs in the waitlist for vouchers and increases in homelessness. The bill has passed the House of Representatives and is now being considered by the Senate.
“Rents have gone up, and at the end of the day, that’s the issue,” she said. “If this bill gets through Congress, it’s only going to get worse.”
Nationally, about 2.3 million households use Section 8 vouchers. House Democrats estimate that 32,000 — or about 1.4 percent — of those households could lose their vouchers if the bill’s cuts to Section 8 are adopted. Locally, that would translate to about 140 households in Erie County that could lose voucher assistance.
Schreiner said that while she can’t anticipate how the bill’s passage would affect BMHA’s funding next year, the authority’s current shortfall is not related to changes proposed by the Trump administration.
Another problem Tedeschi said local advocacy groups have raised is that the shortfalls among public housing authorities further silos voucher holders by demographic, which are normally low-income households of color. One of the goals that local housing officials cited in November for expansion of the program was to desegregate the Buffalo region and to provide better housing options — and more opportunities — for households on Section 8.
Local agencies stress that the current restrictions are temporary and are not meant to discourage moves to “high-opportunity” areas. Tedeschi said that Belmont and local nonprofits plan to advocate in Washington, D.C., this month to prevent funding threats to not only affordable housing but to other forms of public assistance like food, transportation and healthcare.
“We have to figure out how to work together and just to be clear to our clients that we don’t want to take away any choice from you. That’s not our goal. Belmont wants everyone to have access to affordable housing, quality affordable housing,” Tedeschi said.
