Don’t ‘Improve’ Rent Aid

In its most dramatic attempt to redefine the relationship between Washington and very poor Americans, the Bush administration wants Congress to replace the largest federal housing program with open-ended block grants to states. It’s an idea that makes good sense on paper but would inevitably be trashed by reality.

The Section 8 program gives rent vouchers to about 258,000 families in California alone, allowing them to find and pay for apartments outside government projects. Michael Liu, assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, argues that overhauling the program would “improve government support of self-sufficiency efforts for assisted families, efforts to reduce homelessness and ... help the disabled live independently.”

Administration officials rightly suspect that some people capable of self-sufficiency use Section 8 as a crutch, cynically or indolently playing up their difficulties to persuade psychiatrists and other medical professionals to label them “disabled” -- a knock that opens Section 8’s doors.

But the way to rein in such abuse is not to dismantle a successful program like Section 8, which has given so many families a stable home base. Consider Chanda Peters, who testified in support of Section 8 at a congressional hearing recently at the California Science Center in Exposition Park. She described how, after her marriage dissolved, the program gave her decent housing in a safe neighborhood to raise her three daughters.

It also gave her an economic breather. Peters now owns a home (purchased with the help of temporary mortgage vouchers from Section 8), works full time and receives no public assistance. One of her daughters is a student at UCLA; another studies at UC Riverside.

Bush officials should consider tightening federal criteria for disability to ensure that able-bodied people get ample opportunities and encouragement to work. But they should leave Section 8 alone. The principle driving the Section 8 reform -- encouraging self-sufficiency -- is laudable. But the reform itself would not uphold the principle. It would mostly create new problems, saddling states with enormous new oversight responsibilities just when they are facing record deficits.

Lax federal rules intended to “encourage innovation” give them the ability to use Section 8 money for other needs. That could expose low-income renters to the same abuse that the General Accounting Office, in a study released last week, found after the administration made state Medicaid funding more flexible last year. The regulatory loosening was supposed to encourage states to deliver nursing care more efficiently -- in seniors’ homes, for instance, instead of hospitals. But the GAO said the change had allowed states to cut back on nursing care instead.

President Bush’s reform is a solution in search of a problem. He should encourage House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) to table the measure and aim reforms at better targets.