New Section 8 rent vouchers frozen in Miami-Dade because of funding shortfall

Hundreds of people waiting for rent vouchers in Miami-Dade will have to wait even longer as county administrators face a federal order to stop considering most new applications for the Section 8 program.

While the federal government provides funding for Section 8, local agencies administer the program and hand out the vouchers. Federal managers of the subsidy program ordered the county in February to freeze issuing Section 8 vouchers after identifying a $77 million shortfall in the allocation for Miami-Dade.

The local waitlist of nearly 5,000 people has been frozen since then. It’s the first freeze of its kind in about eight years in Miami-Dade.

“Right now because of the shortfall, nobody is coming off of the waitlist,” said Clarence Brown, the county’s deputy housing director overseeing Section 8 programs in the county’s Housing and Community Development Department.

County administrators this week said that rising rents and funding decisions by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) caused the shortfall in a county-administered program that’s expected to receive about $330 million this year for roughly 20,000 vouchers in Miami-Dade. They say Miami-Dade is caught up in a nationwide gap between the available Section 8 funding and the growing costs of housing for low-income residents.

In a Feb. 26 letter to Miami-Dade, a HUD official said the county’s Section 8 program was expected to fall short of its anticipated federal allocation this year and would need a cost-saving plan to get back into compliance and lift the voucher freeze that’s now in its fourth month.

While the letter came during the early weeks of the Trump administration, housing advocacy groups in 2024 were warning of widespread shortfall issues under President Joe Biden as rents shot ahead of federal housing allocations. Last summer, the Biden administration said about 400 housing agencies across the country were forecast to experience shortfalls in 2024.

In Miami-Dade, the freeze doesn’t impact the thousands of people currently relying on existing Section 8 vouchers to subsidize rent. But Miami-Dade is no longer permitted to issue new vouchers, a freeze impacting about 75 households a month based on average attrition rates that would otherwise cause availability in the program, said Nathan Kogon, the county’s director of Housing and Community Development.

He said Miami-Dade will eventually be able to issue the vouchers that were frozen as participants leave the program and make room for new ones. While the county won’t lose its number of vouchers after the freeze is lifted, Miami-Dade is currently limited to funding only ones attached to existing tenants.

“The dollars to fund the program are like gas in a car,” Kogon said. “We have a certain amount of cars. We just don’t have the gas to fuel them.”

The freeze also does not affect Section 8 vouchers tied to low-income housing projects, where the subsidies are attached to individual apartments or houses and not the tenants themselves. The HUD action only covers Miami-Dade’s Section 8 vouchers that are granted to tenants — dollars paid directly to private-sector landlords.

Kogon said the county has already made adjustments and austerity measures that have narrowed the $77 million gap to about $45 million now.

Representatives from HUD were not available for comment Wednesday afternoon.

Kogon said Miami-Dade would have been able to close the shortfall gap more significantly this year if HUD had granted an inflation adjustment in 2025. Instead, he said, the federal agency concluded that rents had flattened enough in the Miami area to keep voucher costs flat for the year.

After a spike during the COVID pandemic, rents have been softening across the Miami area, according to real estate groups. But county administrators said they’re still seeing rising rents on the lower end of the housing ladder, putting pressure on voucher amounts.

“We don’t know what data they were looking at in Miami-Dade County where they could say rents didn’t go up by anything,” said Brown, the deputy director under Kogon. “Rents may not be going up as quickly as they were, but they aren’t going down.”

While Miami-Dade’s county government oversees the Section 8 program locally, a private firm manages most of the operations and forecasting under a contract that’s up for a one-year renewal vote on Thursday. Mayor Daniella Levine Cava is asking county commissioners for a $38 million extension for one year for California-based Nan McKay and Associates to manage Section 8 vouchers while her administration prepares to launch a bidding process for a long-term contract she said in a memo will have better monitoring and performance measures.

This story was originally published June 26, 2025 at 5:00 AM.