Housing group calls for more flexibility in determining size of voucher payments

The Housing Authority of New Orleans has issued nearly 18,000 vouchers, with voucher families constituting a quarter of all rental households in the city. Meanwhile, the number of families living in traditional public housing has fallen.

However, voucher recipient concentration in high-poverty areas after the storm has been well-documented, most recently in a Data Center report in July that also called for ZIP code or neighborhood-level fair market rents.

That report found that voucher-recipient families in New Orleans are far less likely to live in low-poverty neighborhoods than their peers elsewhere in the United States and that the city’s black voucher recipients are less likely to live in low-poverty areas than their white counterparts. What’s more, many voucher families are concentrated in New Orleans East, where reliable public transportation and job centers are scarce.