Like other Cabinet agencies, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is moving quickly to undo long-standing progressive policies. New HUD Secretary Scott Turner has asserted that the agency is now “DEI-free.” Perhaps even more significantly, the agency is considering implementing time limits and work requirements for tenants of public and subsidized housing.
Although we should expect howls of protest from tenant “advocates” as cruel and draconian, such a change would actually benefit subsidized housing residents by encouraging upward mobility, and it would benefit those in need of housing by helping to clear long waiting lists for subsidized apartments.
To understand why, it’s important to know the details of HUD’s budget. In key ways, the agency is actually a vehicle for public assistance, which happens to take the form of a housing subsidy. The largest single line item in HUD’s budget is for “housing choice vouchers”—which allow tenants to pay just 30% of their income in rent. In fiscal 2023, some $30 billion of HUD’s total $72 billion budget went to vouchers. In contrast, HHS spent just $8 billion on the “core assistance” portion of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — cash welfare. The rules for the two programs differ dramatically. Cash welfare comes with a work requirement and a five-year time limit. Housing vouchers — or residence in one of the 886,000 remaining public housing units — have neither.
As a result, housing choice voucher tenants have lived in their units an average of 10 years and public housing tenants, 12 years. In the nation’s largest public housing system in New York, the average is 20 years. That means there are long waiting lists for those needing help.
A time limit coupled with a work requirement would align housing assistance policy with that for cash welfare assistance — which, since “welfare reform” in 1996 has aimed to reduce long-term dependency. As it stands, housing assistance policy does the opposite. Because rent is fixed at 30% of income, an increase in income leads to higher rent. In other words, upward mobility is discouraged. What is encouraged is single parenthood. Those with the lowest incomes typically get priority for a subsidized unit—and those households are typically single parents with children, the largest non-elderly group in public and subsidized housing. HUD data shows that only 3% of households in all subsidized housing are comprised of two parents with children.
Consider the impact of a time limit alone for non-elderly subsidized housing tenants. As a result, tenants would immediately have an incentive to plan for a non-subsidized future. Indeed, a time limit virtually implies a work requirement. Faced with a short subsidy window, tenants would be incentivized to work and save for a looming exit. Ideally, a time limit would be coupled with a flat, fixed rent, which is the norm in non-subsidized housing. That would enable tenants to save more of increased earnings and to avoid the increased rent penalty that comes with having two earners, for example, through marriage. This would limit the revenue received by housing authorities, which own and manage public housing and administer voucher programs. But, in a DOGE new world, they would also be forced to do more with less, as a result.
Lest this all be viewed as pie in the sky, it’s important to know that the time limit approach has already been tried — successfully.
In San Bernadino, California, the local housing authority has adopted exactly such a limit, although it delicately calls the Term-Limited Lease Assistance Program the “ five-year rental assistance program.” The Authority notes that “it is coupled with resources and supportive services to enhance economic self-sufficiency. After five years, rental assistance for TLA participants ends.”
The authority has found that such tenants actually tend to move up and out of public housing before the five-year limit. Earned income for families in the program increased by an average of 31.4% during their five-year term of assistance, full-time employment increased by 20%, and unemployment decreased by 26.5%. Another way to think about the results is that the culture of subsidized housing can be changed.
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On a practical level, increased tenant turnover would make it possible to help those stuck on long waiting lists. For instance, the agency responsible for subsidized housing in Los Angeles County has 30,061 apartments — but reports a waiting list of 8637. The Milwaukee Housing Authority, which has 100,003 units, reports a waitlist of more than 121,000. The Baltimore City Housing Authority administers 21,000 housing vouchers — but reports a waitlist for them of 27,000. The average subsidized tenant spends 29 months on a waiting list before getting help. Not exactly emergency assistance for homeless families. Nor does that number reflect those who have simply given up.
Public housing has long been correctly viewed as one of the progressive movement’s great policy disasters. It has been maintained so badly that the last decade has seen the demolition of more than 200,000 units. But, beyond the physical degradation of the projects, there’s been a culture of long-term dependency both there and in the voucher program, initiated by the Nixon administration to replace new public housing construction. It’s time to move tenants from dependency toward upward mobility. A time limit for new tenants is the right place to start.
Howard Husock is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of the forthcoming book, ‘The Projects: A New History of Public Housing” (NYU Press, August, 2025)