We are excited to announce that our new Executive Director, Thomas Silverstein, will be joining us on April 14! Thomas is currently Director for the Fair Housing and Community Development Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, and is a respected national leader in both civil rights and housing justice work. Please join us in welcoming Thomas and see his bio here.
Project based vouchers and poverty concentration: PRRAC has been opposed to raising the current 30% “cap” on the percentage of Housing Choice Vouchers that can be “project-based,” or allocated to specific physical developments. One of our reasons is the tendency of these project-based vouchers to end up in high poverty neighborhoods at a significantly higher rate than regular tenant-based vouchers. Our newest policy brief, “The potential poverty-concentrating effect of increasing the project-based voucher cap,” looks at the data and finds that, overall, project-based vouchers are significantly more concentrated than regular tenant-based vouchers, but we also found that some PHAs have been able to avoid this outcome by siting PBVs in lower poverty areas.
Minimum income requirements: PRRAC participated in an amicus brief in the Maryland Supreme Court, where a property owner is arguing that they should be able to impose the same minimum income requirements on a low income family with a housing voucher as they require of a non-low-income family – a position that would completely eviscerate the recently adopted Maryland source of income discrimination law. The argument is coming up on May 5th.
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