Los Angeles stops accepting new applicants for Section 8, citing budget uncertainty in Washington

The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles has stopped accepting new applicants for the Section 8 voucher program that subsidizes rent for tens of thousands of tenants in the city.

The local authority, which is funded by the federal government, said it made the move because it doesn’t expect Congress to provide enough cash this year to maintain current operations.

For now, the housing authority has only paused new applications. Those who currently have a Section 8 voucher are unaffected and their rent subsidies will continue, though it’s possible some families could eventually be knocked off.

“We are trying to ensure that we are doing everything possible to avoid that from taking place,” housing authority Chief Executive Lourdes Castro Ramirez said.

The Section 8 program, named after a section of the federal Housing Act, is one of the U.S. government’s most powerful tools to keep rental housing affordable and to fight overcrowding and homelessness.

It is financed with federal dollars but administered by local authorities. In Los Angeles, some 60,000 families use Section 8 vouchers to pay the rent, generally to private landlords.

Tenants typically pay 30% of their income toward rent, with the federal subsidy making up the remainder of the payment to the landlord.

Because rent tends to rise each year, housing authorities need to see their budgets increase by a certain amount annually to maintain current operations.

But funding from the federal government is set to expire March 14, and the Trump administration and congressional Republicans are looking to shrink the size of government.

Carlos Van Natter, the head of the Section 8 program at L.A.’s housing authority, said proposals from the House and Senate are not expected to be enough to keep up with obligations, leading to annual shortfalls projected to range from nearly $48 million to $114 million.

Housing authorities across the country are facing similar issues, but Los Angeles’ funding problem was made worse because last year, under the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development took back $38 million in reserves from the authority to help fund local agencies elsewhere in the country that were then experiencing shortfalls, Van Natter said.

HUD did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Van Natter said his agency had estimated the worst projections coming out of Congress could require it to cancel the vouchers of 6,000 households that currently use them.

Van Natter said his agency is working with the federal agency to minimize the impact to both tenants and landlords and decided to pause new applicants as a first step to start reducing its shortfall, though he didn’t have an estimate for how much the action will save.

There are 2,900 households that were in the middle of the Section 8 application process that now won’t receive a voucher, along with about 400 others that applied to several other small programs for homeless individuals that the housing authority also paused.

And an additional 24,000 households on the Section 8 waiting list can’t move forward in the process either.

Some voucher programs were not paused, including one specifically for homeless veterans, as well as a special type of Section 8 voucher that can be used only at specific properties.

People with a traditional Section 8 voucher who haven’t yet found a place to live will also see no change, and can continue looking with their subsidy.

Castro Ramirez called on Congress to provide more resources so the authority can reopen applications and not risk further cuts.

“The economic and human impact of these funding gaps cannot be overstated,” she said. “Los Angeles could see increased housing instability, affecting thousands of families, property owners, and the broader community.”