Housing Vouchers and Tax Credits: Pairing the Proposal to Transform Section 8 with Expansions to the EITC and the Child Tax Credit Could Cut the National Poverty Rate by Half
This past summer, Vice President Biden’s campaign put forward a plan to address the housing affordability crisis through the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program. Current law limits the number of Section 8 vouchers that can be issued, but the Biden proposal would transform Section 8 into an entitlement. Such an expansion could lead to substantial reductions in the national poverty rate, which we quantify for the first time in this brief.
In addition, we examine the cumulative impacts that the Section 8 expansion could have if it were implemented alongside the LIFT Act and the American Family Act–two proposals that have been advanced or considered by Vice President Biden, his running mate Senator Harris, or both. Our results show that combining the Section 8 expansion with the LIFT Act and the AFA could yield greater cumulative impacts, cutting the national poverty rate by nearly half and the child poverty rate by nearly 75 percent. This translates to moving close to 20 million people in the United States out of poverty, of whom 7.4 million are children.
Note: Results were updated in August 2023 to account for an error in the housing subsidy calculation. In the original calculation, if an SPM poverty unit’s prorated subsidy was larger than the shelter and utilities portion of their SPM threshold, we capped it at this portion of the threshold. In the updated version, if the prorated subsidy was larger than the shelter and utilities portion of their SPM threshold, we capped it at this portion of the threshold minus the total tenant payment. We also do not include cost estimates in the updated version of the brief.