HUD to Publish Technical Corrections to Certain HOTMA Voucher Provisions

Tomorrow, June 14, HUD will publish in the Federal Register a notice titled “Housing Opportunity through Modernization Act of 2016: Implementation of Various Section 8 Voucher Provisions; Corrections.” This notice makes technical corrections to the prior notice published by HUD implementing certain HOTMA voucher provisions. The effective date for the original notice and the corrections remains April 18, 2017.

Corrections in this notice include the following:

• Clarifies that in the “Units Owned by a PHA” section, the threshold for control should be “more than 50 percent” rather than “50 percent or more”;
• Units receiving assistance under section 201 of the Housing and Community Development Amendments of 1978 (the Flexible Subsidy program) are now excepted (i.e., not counted towards the limitation) from the Project-based voucher (PBV) general cap and income-mixing cap;
• For PBV new construction units that qualify as replacement housing for covered units and are exempt from the general cap, one of the requirements should read “site of the original development” instead of “site of the original public housing development”;
• Clarifies that PHAs may not rely solely on a supportive services program that would require a family to engage in the supportive services once the family enrolls (e.g., Family Self-Sufficiency), for the unit to meet the supportive services exception (which excepts families eligible for supportive services, instead of receiving supportive services from the PBV income-mixing cap);
• Clarifies that projects in a census tract with a poverty rate of 20 percent or less are subject to a alternative income mixing requirement of the greater of 25 units or 40 percent of the units (the original notice implied that these projects were completely excluded from the income-mixing cap);
• Corrects an incorrect definition of new construction units that qualify for the exception as replacement housing for the income-mixing PBV cap–the definition in C.3.D(2)(b) (describing projects not subject to the income-mixing cap) is supposed to match the definition in section C.2.C(2)(b);
• Clarifies that in those instances where a PHA is engaged in an initiative to improve, develop, or replace a public housing property or site to attach PBVs to projects that a PHA has an ownership or controlling interest without following a competitive process, the requirement that rehabilitation or construction on the project must have a minimum of $25,000 per unit in hard costs is not applicable in a situation where the PHA is replacing a public housing property or site with existing housing owned or controlled by the PHA; and
• Makes numerous typographical corrections.

The pre-publication notice making corrections can be found here.

The original notice implementing certain HOTMA voucher provisions can be found here.

NAHRO’s prior blog post on the effective date of these certain HOTMA voucher provisions can be found here.