Black families in Houston may soon find stable housing slipping further out of reach as sweeping changes to Section 8, the federal Housing Choice Voucher program, take shape under the Trump administration.
Amid a worsening national affordable housing and homelessness crisis, President Donald Trump’s administration is determined to reshape HUD’s expansive role in providing stable housing for low-income people, which has been at the heart of its mission for generations. The proposed changes include a two-year limit on the federal government’s signature rental assistance programs.
While the Trump administration has not officially implemented any changes, Housing officials are on high alert. The administration’s proposed budget includes deep cuts to HUD rental assistance, including Section 8, with reductions projected to impact millions of families nationwide. More than 3.8 million people could lose access to housing vouchers. Proposed time limits on rental assistance would also put 1.4 million low-income households at risk of losing their homes, many of them working families with children.
“It’s broken and deviated from its original purpose, which is to temporarily help Americans in need. HUD assistance is not supposed to be permanent. It should be a trampoline, not a hammock and not a resting place.”
Scott Turner, HUD Secretary
“We have been taking inventory of every program and found HUD’s rental assistance to be full of waste, fraud and abuse,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said during House budget hearing on June 10. “It’s broken and deviated from its original purpose, which is to temporarily help Americans in need. HUD assistance is not supposed to be permanent. It should be a trampoline, not a hammock and not a resting place.”
The changes would transform Section 8 from a guaranteed federal program into state-administered block grants, with less oversight and stricter eligibility rules. Families without seniors or people with disabilities could face a two-year cap on assistance. Nearly 70% of current recipients would lose support under the new guidelines.
For Black families in Houston—who are disproportionately represented among voucher holders—the effects could be devastating. Many HUD-assisted families already earn less than $18,000 annually. Without rental support, they would face eviction, homelessness or relocation into substandard housing.
According to the Associated Press, New research from New York University found that if families were cut off after two years, 1.4 million households could lose their vouchers and public housing subsidies — largely working families with children. This would lead housing authorities to evict many families, the report said.
A broad time limit would cause “substantial disruption and dislocation,” it said, noting that the policy is largely untested and that most of the few housing authorities that voluntarily tried it eventually abandoned the pilots.
A break from HUD’s long-held purpose of helping house the poor could also jeopardize its contracts with private landlords, who say they’re already feeling the uncertainty as public housing authorities announce they’re scaling back in anticipation of the cuts.
Critics fear the restriction could derail those working towards self-sufficiency, defeating the goal time-limit supporters hope to achieve.
Beyond housing
The ripple effects go far beyond housing. Families forced from their homes often experience disruptions in children’s education, loss of employment stability, and increased reliance on already strained local shelters and nonprofits. Houston’s housing market, already marked by long waitlists for affordable units, would be unable to absorb the surge.
The cuts come even as federal dollars are prioritized in other areas, particularly immigration enforcement. Advocates warn that if these changes are implemented, families will be pushed back into cycles of instability that Section 8 was created to prevent.
Congress is on summer break until Sept. 2 and has until the Sept. 30 government funding deadline to finalize and pass a funding bill.
