As San Diego’s Section 8 Waiting List Grows, Families Aren’t Getting Vouchers

Tens of thousands of struggling San Diego families are vying for Section 8 vouchers to help them pay the rent, yet the city’s housing agency hasn’t handed out tenant-based vouchers to families on its waiting list for nearly two years. 

Surging San Diego rents and insufficient funding mean this startling reality is unlikely to change anytime soon – barring a major influx of federal dollars. 

The San Diego Housing Commission doles out and oversees thousands of Section 8 vouchers in the city. In recent years, its list of families seeking rental subsidies has soared along with housing costs.  

As of earlier this year, nearly 58,000 families were seeking Section 8 vouchers to help cover their rent and about 17,000 were already relying on that assistance. Hundreds jump onto the Housing Commission’s waiting list each month. Most of these families are seeking or counting on so-called housing choice vouchers that require them to find a landlord who accepts Section 8 and to pay about 30 percent of their income in monthly rent. 

But the Housing Commission hasn’t had the capacity to hand out tenant-based Section 8 vouchers to families on its waiting list since August 2022, said Azucena Valladolid, the agency’s executive vice president of rental assistance and workforce development. 

“Federal funding for housing choice voucher rental assistance is insufficient to assist all the households with lower income that need it,” Valladolid wrote in an email. 

This is a national problem. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, which disperses Section 8 voucher funding, estimated last year that just one in four families eligible for rental assistance across the nation receive it. 

The situation is especially dire in high-rent cities like San Diego.  

In the past four years, Valladolid said the Housing Commission’s average per-family subsidy for housing assistance has spiked 49 percent – from $876 a month to $1,300.

Federal support coming in to help cover families’ rents isn’t keeping up with those amounts or the need. 

The Housing Commission reported spending $226.2 million on housing assistance payments during the current fiscal year but had only received $210.5 million in HUD funding as of mid-April. It’s unclear how much the housing agency will receive in the upcoming year. 

The commission says it’s serving more families than it’s receiving money to support. 

These mismatches are forcing difficult decisions at the Housing Commission. 

For the past seven years, the agency has annually increased the maximum monthly rental assistance for families – known as payment standards – to try to keep up with skyrocketing rents. 

There’s a tradeoff here. If the Housing Commission hands families who already have vouchers more money to help pay the rent each month, it’s got less cash to allocate for additional families desperate for the same support. 

Jeff Davis, the Housing Commission’s deputy CEO, said the Housing Commission is focused on ensuring families who already have vouchers don’t lose their homes. 

“Our priority is to raise payment standards to minimize the rent burden SDHC’s rental assistance participants experience and prevent them from potentially being priced out of their rental homes,” Davis wrote in an email.  

The agency’s increasing Section 8 voucher allocations to house homeless San Diegans and commit vouchers to specific housing projects have only increased the pressure on the city’s limited supply of vouchers – and the increasing demand for them.  

The Housing Commission has usually had to rely on the same pool of HUD funding to support those efforts. Valladolid said that’s meant the Housing Commission has needed to reduce the number of  Section 8 vouchers it’s given families on its waiting list to fulfill those commitments.  

The nearly 1,900 vouchers awarded to specific projects over the last five years, namely supportive housing facilities for formerly homeless people, have meant fewer vouchers are available for families on the Housing Commission’s waiting list.  

And Valladolid said increasing per-family costs for those who do have vouchers mean the Housing Commission needs to dial back future commitments to housing projects so it can keep supporting families who already have vouchers. 

“Without additional federal funding for rental housing vouchers, SDHC will not be able to continue to award or commit project-based housing vouchers for these populations in coming years at the same level we have in the recent past,” Valladolid wrote. 

Housing Commission Chair Mitch Mitchell said the agency is considering those tradeoffs as it refines its budget for the upcoming fiscal year and talks with Mayor Todd Gloria’s team about its needs after a dispute over homelessness funding.  

“Our agency, the Housing Commission, is looked at as a resource and it is easy to understand why people would become more disappointed as the list and the length of time to get a voucher grows,” Mitchell said. “This is a period where we really have to focus on ruthless prioritization.” 

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