The Struggle for Stable Housing in the U.S.
Havalah Hopkins rarely turns down the chain restaurant catering gigs that take her to events across the Seattle area, from church potlucks to office lunches and graduation parties. These jobs provide her with delivery fees and tips on top of her $18 hourly wage, making it more lucrative than minimum-wage work, even if the income isn’t consistent. This income helps her afford the government-subsidized apartment she and her 14-year-old autistic son have lived in for three years, though it’s still challenging to make ends meet.
“It’s a cycle of feeling defeated and depleted, no matter how much energy and effort and tenacity you have towards surviving,” Hopkins said.
Despite these challenges, the 33-year-old single mother is grateful for her stable housing. Experts estimate that only one in four low-income households eligible for U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rental assistance actually receive the benefits. However, she now faces the risk of losing her home as federal officials consider changes to HUD policy.
A Shift in Policy
Amid a worsening affordable housing and homelessness crisis, the Trump administration has sought to reshape HUD’s role in providing stable housing for low-income people. This has been a core part of HUD’s mission for generations. The proposed changes include a two-year limit on the federal government’s signature rental assistance programs.
At a June congressional budget hearing, HUD Secretary Scott Turner argued that policies like time limits would address waste and fraud in public housing and Section 8 voucher programs. “It’s broken and deviated from its original purpose, which is to temporarily help Americans in need,” Turner said. “HUD assistance is not supposed to be permanent.”
However, this move to restrict key subsidies marks a significant retreat from HUD’s traditional role. Millions of tenants moved into subsidized housing with the promise of support as long as they remained poor enough to qualify. Time limits would be a seismic shift that could destabilize the most vulnerable households, many of whom are unlikely to ever afford today’s record-high rents.
Research Highlights Risks
New research from New York University (NYU), obtained exclusively by The Associated Press, found that if families were cut off after two years, 1.4 million households could lose their vouchers and public housing subsidies — largely working families with children. This would lead housing authorities to evict many families, the report said.
A broad time limit would cause “substantial disruption and dislocation,” the report noted, adding that the policy is largely untested and most of the few housing authorities to voluntarily try it eventually abandoned the pilots.
A break from HUD’s long-held purpose of helping house the poor could also jeopardize its contracts with private landlords, who say they’re already feeling the uncertainty as public housing authorities from Seattle to Atlanta announce they’re scaling back in anticipation of federal funding cuts.
Critics fear the restriction could derail those working towards self-sufficiency — defeating the goal time-limit supporters hope to achieve.
Working Families at Risk
Researchers from the Housing Solutions Lab at NYU’s Furman Center analyzed HUD’s data over a 10-year period and found about 70% of households who could be affected by a two-year limit had already been living on those subsidies for two or more years. That’s based on 2024 estimates and doesn’t include elderly and disabled people who wouldn’t be subject to time limits.
Exempted households make up about half of the roughly 4.9 million households getting rental assistance. In the first study to examine the proposed policy’s possible impacts, the NYU researchers found time limits would largely punish families who are working but earning far below their area’s median income, which would ultimately shift federal rental assistance away from households with kids.
“Housing assistance is especially impactful for children,” said Claudia Aiken, the study co-author and director of new research partnerships for the Housing Solutions Lab. Their health, education, employment and earnings potential can “change in really meaningful ways if they have stable housing,” she said.
Landlords Face Uncertainty
The average household in HUD-subsidized housing stays about six years, studies show. HUD funds local public housing projects where nearly 1 million households live and the Section 8 vouchers that about 4 million households use to offset their private rentals.
There’s been little guidance from HUD on how time-limited housing assistance would be implemented — how it would be enforced, when the clock starts and how the exemptions would be defined. Both Democrats and Republicans have acknowledged the potential for time limits to help curb HUD’s notorious waitlists.
Hard-liners contend the threat of housing loss will push people to reach self-sufficiency; others see limits, when coupled with support and workforce incentives, as a means to motivate tenants to improve their lives. Yet there are strikingly few successful examples.
The Impact on Individuals
For Havalah Hopkins, the policy would likely leave her and her son homeless in an economy that often feels indifferent to working poor people like her. “A two-year time limit is ridiculous,” she said. “It’s so disrespectful. I think it’s dehumanizing — the whole system.”
Working families are most at risk. Researchers found that 70% of households who could be affected by a two-year limit had already been living on those subsidies for two or more years. This includes families like Hopkins, whose family was on a years-long waitlist in the expensive region where she grew up. In July 2022, she and her son moved into a two-bedroom public housing unit in Woodinville, Washington. She pays $450 a month in rent — 30% of her household income.
A market-rate apartment in the area costs at least $2,000 more, according to the King County Housing Authority, which in June announced it would pause issuing some new vouchers.
Hopkins knows she could never afford to live in her home state without rental assistance. It was a relief they could stay as long as they needed. She had been struggling to scrape together hundreds of dollars more a month for her previous trailer home.
“There’s no words to put on feeling like your housing is secure,” Hopkins said. “I feel like I was gasping for air and I’m finally able to breathe.”
She credits the housing subsidy for her ability to finally leave an abusive marriage, and still dreams of more — perhaps her own catering business or working as a party decorator.
“We all can’t be lawyers and doctors — and two years isn’t enough to even become that,” Hopkins said.
Since learning of Trump’s proposal, Hopkins said she’s been haunted by thoughts of shoving her possessions into a van with her son, upending the stability she built for him.
Challenges and Concerns
The average household in HUD-subsidized housing stays about six years, studies show. HUD funds local public housing projects where nearly 1 million households live and the Section 8 vouchers that about 4 million households use to offset their private rentals.
There’s been little guidance from HUD on how time-limited housing assistance would be implemented — how it would be enforced, when the clock starts and how the exemptions would be defined. Both Democrats and Republicans have acknowledged the potential for time limits to help curb HUD’s notorious waitlists.
Hard-liners contend the threat of housing loss will push people to reach self-sufficiency; others see limits, when coupled with support and workforce incentives, as a means to motivate tenants to improve their lives. Yet there are strikingly few successful examples.
Landlords Dilemma
HUD’s Section 8 programs have long depended on hundreds of thousands of for-profit and nonprofit small business owners and property managers to accept tenant vouchers. Now, landlords fear a two-year limit could put their contracts for HUD-subsidized housing in limbo.
Amid the uncertainty, Denise Muha, executive director of the National Leased Housing Association, said multiple landlord groups have voiced their concerns about HUD’s next budget in a letter to congressional leaders. She said landlords generally agree two years is simply not enough time for most low-income tenants to change their fortunes.
“As a practical matter, you’re going to increase your turnover, which is a cost,” Muha said. “Nobody wants to throw out their tenants without cause.”
It’s always been a significant lift for private landlords to work with HUD subsidies, which involve burdensome paperwork, heavy oversight and maintenance inspections.
But the trade-off is a near guarantee of dependable longer-term renters and rental income. If that’s compromised, some landlords say they’d pull back from the federal subsidy programs.
Brad Suster, who owns 86 Chicago-area units funded by HUD, said accepting subsidies could become risky.
“Would we have the same reliability that we know has traditionally come for countless years from the federal government?” Suster said. “That’s something landlords and owners want to know is there.”
The diminishing housing stock available to low-income tenants has been a brewing problem for HUD. Between 2010 and 2020, some 50,000 housing providers left the voucher program, the agency has reported.
Chaos and Trade-offs
It’s up for debate whether lawmakers will buy into Trump’s vision for HUD.
This week the U.S. House appropriations committee is taking up HUD’s 2026 budget, which so far makes no mention of time limits.
HUD’s Lovett noted the Senate’s budget plans for the agency have not yet been released, and said the administration remains focused on future implementation of time limits.
“HUD will continue to engage with colleagues on the hill to ensure a seamless transition and enforcement of any new time limit,” Lovett said in a statement.
Noëlle Porter, the director of government affairs at the National Housing Law Project, said Trump’s fight for time limits is far from over, noting that legislative and rule changes could make them a reality.
“It is clearly a stated goal of the administration to impose work requirements and time limits on rental assistance, even though it would be wildly unpopular,” Porter said.
Democratic Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina says there’s no evidence time limits would save HUD money.
“This doesn’t help families who already are working multiple jobs to become self-sufficient,” Clyburn said at a June hearing. “Instead, it creates chaos, financial uncertainty and pushes these families into more severe trade-offs.”
Time limits could imperil Aaliyah Barnes’ longtime dream of graduating college and becoming a nurse, finding a job and a home she can afford.
The 28-year-old single mom in Louisville, Kentucky, this year joined Family Scholar House, which provides counseling and support for people pursuing an education — and, to Barnes’ relief, housing.
Her apartment is paid for by a Section 8 voucher. In March, Barnes moved in and her 3-year-old son, Aarmoni, finally got his own room, where she set up a learning wall.
Previously, she had struggled to afford housing on her wages at a call center — and living with her mom, two sisters and their kids in a cramped house was an environment ridden with arguments.
The stable future she’s building could disappear, though, if she’s forced out in two years when her schooling is expected to take three years.
“I’d be so close, but so far away,” Barnes said.
