Photo by Chris Hogg, DigitalJournal.com As the U.S. sees growing economic troubles including increases in the number of housing foreclosures, this part of a newly-built subdivision in Austell, Georgia sits empty or virtually unpopulated. image:40496:2::0

In general, Section 8 Housing is a Federal subsidy that provides assistance to qualifying low-income families in terms of living arrangements and can fall under two categories: project based, which means the family lives in a specified complex or tenant based, where they may choose to live anywhere in a qualifying public sector and a landlord is paid by the government through vouchers up to "Fair Market Rent" value and the tenant pays the remaining portion, which is no more than 30 percent of income.

A news story that aired on July 2 discovered the around one hundred recipients of Section 8 in Robstown, Texas have been officially "evicted" from their qualifying homes but not because of their being poor tenants.

A letter was sent out stating that as of August 1, 2008, their subsidy would be terminated due to lack of Federal funds and that these funds would not be available through the remainder of 2008.

In an interview with the local Executive Director of the Federal Housing Authority in Robstown, Laura L. Young, she states that they will do everything in their power with regards to the displacement of the families in order to get them into another unit.

Also, according to Young, over half of those who have been officially evicted due to lack of Federal funds have reapplied for Public Housing, which are the project based housing mentioned above, as there is space available in Robstown for project based housing.

Recently, an organization called saveourhomes.org sent out a flyer describing how HUD admittedly miscalculated Section 8 Housing projections:

HUD officials admit they do not know how much is really needed (it's "either $1.2 or $2.4 billion"), their numbers change "from day to day", & a HUD contractor has uncovered "100,000 errors in HUD's Section 8 database."

Back in 2004-2005, a similar mishandling of funds occurred and an article by the New York Times reported that HUD had shorted the poorest of recipients by $50 mission US dollars. Even a recent PBS interview with the now FORMER Chief of HUD, Alphonso Jackson, no problems of short funding were mentioned.
It will be interesting to see if other recipients across the nation are receiving similar eviction notices due to errors in Federal projections and calculations.