In Cuyahoga County, housing vouchers currently help nearly 17,000 households pay rent. The Housing Choice Voucher program, which most people refer to as Section 8, is the federal government’s largest housing assistance program. It is intended to give renters on a tight income a choice on where to live.
In 2023, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) spent about $30 billion to help roughly 2 million households nationwide. HUD gives money to local agencies to run the voucher programs. Cleveland’s housing authorities are Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA), North Coast (formerly Parma Housing Authority) and EDEN.
Over the summer, Signal Cleveland dug into housing vouchers and the barriers to getting one. In Cuyahoga County, people can spend between one and five years on the waitlist, according to HUD.
When people get a voucher, the struggle often continues. Only 36% of people who get a voucher from CMHA are able to use it within six months. Those who can’t quickly find somewhere to live can lose their voucher.
“People participating in the program are supposed to have housing choice,” Kris Keniray told Signal Cleveland. Keniray works for a housing nonprofit that advocates against housing discrimination.
But for a number of reasons – rising rents, cumbersome rules for tenants and landlords and racial and source of income discrimination – choices are limited.
Voucher holders have shared with Signal Cleveland frustrations about not being able to use the benefit in cities where they want to live, such as Cleveland Heights, to be near family or community resources and, instead, steered toward neighborhoods they are unfamiliar with or that they view as unsafe. Some cities have laws to protect tenants from discrimination based on their use of vouchers, but enforcement is uneven at best.
Signal Cleveland created a map to show a snapshot of where vouchers were in use throughout the county in the spring of 2024. Most vouchers are concentrated on Cleveland’s East Side.
Want to know more about how vouchers work? Start here.
There are long waitlists for Section 8 vouchers in Cuyahoga County. But here’s how you can try to get one.
Mapping Cuyahoga County’s housing vouchers
The map shows where vouchers make up higher and lower shares of rental units. Areas with 10 or fewer vouchers in use aren’t colored on the map because HUD excludes those for privacy reasons. In those areas, there could be up to 10 vouchers.
The map includes both “tenant-based” vouchers that are tied to a person and “project-based” vouchers that are tied to the rental unit. The majority of vouchers are tenant-based.
There are lots of reasons why vouchers are concentrated in certain areas. In some cases, government funding is used to build affordable housing in specific communities. Across the city, the cost of rent differs, creating areas that are more “affordable” than others.
In hopes of removing barriers to renting with a voucher, the Fair Housing Center for Rights and Research has advocated for stronger legal protections for Section 8 vouchers. Source of income protections are designed to make it easier for people with vouchers to rent, but enforcing these laws has been difficult.
“If we had true housing choice, we might expect to see a more even distribution throughout the county or at least less concentration than we see on the current map,” Keniray said.
Do legal protections for voucher use make a difference?
Over the last decade, several Cuyahoga County cities have passed legal protections based on how a tenant is paying the rent. Cleveland Heights, South Euclid and University Heights have specific protections for voucher use. The majority of cities have no protections. Only 6% of – 850 out of about 14,300 housing vouchers – are used in the three cities where there are specific protections for renters using vouchers. The rest are being used in cities without these protections. About half the cities in Cuyahoga County have 10 or fewer vouchers being used to pay rent.
Places that have specific protections for renters who use housing vouchers have very slightly higher rates of voucher use out of the total occupied rentals – about 7% of rentals compared to 6% in cities with no protections.
In hopes of removing barriers to renting with a voucher, the Fair Housing Center for Rights and Research has advocated for stronger legal protections for Section 8. Source of income protections are designed to make it easier for people with vouchers to rent, but enforcing these laws has been difficult.
Households with vouchers typically make less than $15,000 per year
HUD requires agencies to give 75% of new vouchers to “extremely low-income” households. In Cuyahoga County, that means that a one-person household cannot make more than $20,450 per year.
However, most households that receive vouchers make significantly less than that, even if they have more people. In 2023, 62% of households in Cuyahoga County that received a housing voucher made less than $15,000 a year.
A lot of people who use vouchers either have a disability or have someone with a disability in the household.
Locally, women are the most common voucher recipients, according to HUD. Roughly half or more have children who live in the household. About 1% of voucher recipients are headed by men with children.
Most voucher holders in Cuyahoga County are Black (87%) or Latinx (5%).
Taking the ‘choice’ out of the housing choice voucher program
Before the Housing Choice Voucher program was created, the option for people on limited incomes involved living in government-subsidized housing, also called public housing. In 1937, Cleveland was one of the first cities to receive federal funding to build affordable housing. The three projects included: Outhwaite Homes Estates, Cedar Apartments and Lakeview Terrace.
Did you know that Carl and Louis Stokes lived in Outhwaite Homes in 1938? Carl Stokes went on to become the first Black mayor of a major U.S. city when elected in Cleveland in 1967. His older brother, Louis, became Ohio’s first Black congressman in 1968.
Click here to learn more about the history of Outhwaite Homes, which was Cleveland’s first federally funded housing program.
By the 1960s, a report by the U.S. Civil Rights Commission noted Black tenants in public housing – 47% of all tenants in Cleveland – were still concentrated on the city’s East Side.
More than 50 years later, not much has changed, with voucher distribution largely mirroring historical racial segregation patterns. Austin Cummings, a researcher for the Fair Housing Center told Signal Cleveland voucher holders continue to be “overly concentrated” in areas with “some of the lowest opportunities.”
