How Far Will Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers Grow?

• Author: William Asher
• Posted: 2024-07-31

Housing choice vouchers are basically a legal measure which allows people drawing Section 8 housing assistance to choose where to live.

At a previous point in America, recipients of Section 8 housing assistance could only live in housing that the government either (a) built itself as public housing, or (b) approved of.

With vouchers, Section 8 recipients get to choose where they want to live. As long as the landlord or property owner in question will accept the vouchers, the recipient can live there on the government's dime. This was supposed to be a temporary program to help pull people out of poverty, but it has become one of the biggest forms of generational welfare in America. Most people do not get off of Section 8 once on it.

To "solve" this issue, activists and some politicians want to greatly expand housing choice vouchers, by multiple billions of dollars. Their reasoning is that if people get to live where they want, they can get out of poverty. It's actually their surroundings keeping them poor, according to the "experts." So their idea is to expand these vouchers greatly. It's also a bipartisan issue in America, with support on both sides.

Soon There May Not Be Choice

Because offering Section 8 housing to people is a bipartisan issue, the fact is that it's only going to grow, and the government is going to take more and more liberties with how it works. This isn't speculation; it's simply a historic assessment. This has been precisely what the government has done for nearly a hundred years with the program, and it's reaching a point now where landlords are going to no longer have a say in whether or not they want to accept these tenants.

You can already witness in some states that the government is the entity that decides whether or not landlords should be renting to Section 8 tenants. Instead of getting to raise their rental rates along with inflation or the housing market prices, some landlords are forced to accept housing choice vouchers if presented. There is no option. Expect this to grow throughout the country. In fact, given how President Joe Biden gets to unilaterally decree so much in America, this measure could very realistically be something passed via executive order in the near future.

Statistics Left Out of the Science

Americans live in a time where they're constantly lectured to by the media, politicians and famous celebrities about "the truth," and mainly about "science." Take your vaccine and never ask questions. Yes, of course men are real women if they say so. And on this goes. If you dare even ask questions, you're denounced as some evil right-wing conspiracy theorist, probably a secret Kremlin agent on Vladimir Putin's payroll. That's how insane discourse has gotten in America, but nevertheless it's the status quo. To keep your free speech free, you must say whatever the populist take is, and that's apparently freedom. So if you were to learn that the social science claiming that more people need Section 8 because of systemic racism was really all false, you likely wouldn't be shocked.

Sociologists and others in that realm claim that it's "science" to suggest that POC, specifically black people, need Section 8 at disproportionate rates due to being held down by a nation that is systemically oppressing them. Though if you were to look at the statistics of Section 8 and its generational impact, you would reach another conclusion.

The stats suggest that people of any race who get off of Section 8 are out much more likely to be out of poverty in a generation, whereas people who stay on it pass it down much like an inheritance, and their children (and their children) end up on the program.

So, if black people are getting out of poverty by getting off of welfare, is America only systemically racist against the ones who stay on it? Is there a lottery or something?

Of course, you are not allowed to repeat this in public, even though it is strictly a statistical fact. In fact, even thinking this could be a crime one day.

The point here is that Section 8 housing choice vouchers are going to grow. It's inevitable. America has taken in millions of poor immigrants in the past year, and poor populations reproduce a lot more than wealthy ones. The only real question is: How far will the vouchers expand? The likely answer is: As far as politicians can push them.