WATERVILLE, Maine — It took seven years, three bouts of homelessness and two federal housing vouchers for 25-year-old Shania Handy to secure an affordable apartment.
Handy is one of thousands of Mainers who have received a Section 8 voucher, the largest federal rent assistance program for low-income people. It generally pays the difference between 30 to 40 percent of a household’s income and the cost of rent, and is typically valued at around $1,000.
Maine’s Section 8 waitlist has more than 22,500 people on it, according to MaineHousing, the state housing authority. Even though a third of applicants wind up being ineligible, people often wait years to get into the program. When they get aid, they often lose it when they can’t find affordable apartments that have been in short supply during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s been really rough,” Handy said of her time waiting for housing. “I was super depressed, I was super stressed out. I was always on the money, thinking, ‘I need to make money,’ I couldn’t ever sit down and relax.”
The issues with Section 8 are leading state lawmakers to consider initiatives designed to cover the federal program’s weaknesses. Last year, 30 percent of vouchers administered by MaineHousing in towns without housing authorities expired after being issued with an average wait time of six years. In Waterville, it was 45 percent and three years.
Handy was 18 and relying on federal Supplemental Security Income payments because of a disability that prevented her from working when she first applied for rental assistance. In 2017, she got her voucher after only a few months. But when she couldn’t find an available apartment in Waterville within the allotted 60 days, it expired.
She became homeless and reapplied but waited nearly five years for a second voucher. Though Handy found an apartment that time, that long wait took a toll on her mental and physical health and meant she didn’t have a safe place to sleep for years.
“That’s six years of instability, of paying a large chunk of your income on rent every month, of potentially experiencing homelessness, or being evicted,” Sonya Acosta, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank, of the typical waits in parts of Maine. “It’s a lot of hardship during that six years.”
Rapidly increasing market rents are outpacing the cost of a housing choice voucher. Market rents nationwide increased 28 percent from June 2020 to June 2023, according to Zillow data. The average cost of a voucher only increased 18 percent, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The Waterville Housing Authority received $2.1 million in 2023 from the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department and used it to finance more than 4,000 unit months. Nearly 1,500 people are on their waiting list alone.
Amy Meservie, 41, was on that waitlist for five years before she got her voucher in 2020. But she needed a place that could accommodate her wheelchair and a family of five on her voucher and SSI income. Meservie couldn’t find any ground-floor apartments that weren’t one-bedroom efficiencies, and had to give up her voucher. Since 2020, she’s lived in a tent, a vehicle, and now lives in a trailer with her husband in her mother’s backyard in Vassalboro.
Meservie has no plans to reapply for a voucher, because she doesn’t think the dollar value of the voucher will be enough to afford an apartment in central Maine right now or in the future.
“I’m trying. It’s just hard. It’s a day to day struggle, and it hurts,” she said.
Lawmakers and policy experts statewide and nationally are looking at changing that. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is lobbying Congress to provide an increase of $2.3 billion to housing voucher funding in its 2024 appropriations bills.
U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who serves as her party’s top Senate appropriator, has introduced more federal funding flexibility to the Bangor and Lewiston housing authorities by admitting them into HUD’s ‘Moving to Work’ program.
At the state level, Rep. Cheryl Golek, D-Harpswell, introduced a bill this month that would allow public housing authorities to increase the dollar value of a Section 8 voucher by applying for a waiver from the federal government.
The bill also calls for standardizing and lengthening the time limit on how soon a voucher has to be leased up once it’s been issued and would allow someone with a voucher to use it outside the geographic area in which it was issued to them. Golek said her own reliance on housing choice vouchers as a single mother 34 years ago informed her ideas.
“We’ve got a waitlist, consistently, of close to 20,000 people, and we really have no plan on fixing this for them,” Golek said.