LEWISTON — Lewiston Housing is launching the nation’s first U.S. Housing and Urban Development-approved pilot program putting federal dollars in the hands of tenants rather than direct payments to landlords.

The five-year, 60-tenant program is HUD’s aim, under the Moving To Work Demonstration Program, to understand how alternative methods can help provide housing to those who need assistance. 

In Lewiston Housing’s direct rental assistance program, 60 tenants a year will receive restricted debit cards that can be used to pay rent or to cover other expenses that allow the tenant to afford market rate housing. 

The program launched in April entering prospective participants on to a lottery-based waiting list. It operates on the same eligibility criteria as Section 8 housing vouchers, which includes the tenant paying 30%-40% of their monthly income on housing with the remaining balance being covered by the housing authority.

Lewiston Housing officials hope to see that the method works more efficiently than traditional vouchers, Deputy Director Travis Heynen said.

“Landlords sometimes discriminate against people with vouchers,” Heynen said. “This program basically creates a very transparent assistance so that in theory, the landlord may never know that the recipient is receiving assistance.”

Beyond addressing stigma, the program will hopefully yield some efficiencies for the agency, Heynen said, which must complete administrative work and paperwork as the go-between with tenants and landlords. It also eases the burden on tenants navigating the rental market, giving them more choice in where they live and how to budget, he said.

“People in poverty don’t have choices around how to spend their money,” Heynen said. “If they have housing assistance, it can go to housing. If they have food assistance, they can only buy certain foods, right?  So if someone’s car breaks down and they need to spend the money to fix it so they can go to work, pay their rent and not get fired and end up evicted — it’s a win in my mind.”

Heynen said safeguards will include restricting the use of the debit cards to certain certain goods and services, monitoring how and where money is spent, freezing cards if necessary, and requiring repayment and/or removal from the program if the assistance is misused. 

The end goal of the program is to make people less dependent on government assistance overall, to help them grow, and to eventually be successful enough to get off the program, Heynen said.

Applied economist Anamika Sen of Bates College and economist Kyle Coombs of Vassar College will be carrying out research on the program. Both said they hope to find consistencies among program participants showing that the new model creates greater economic freedom. 

The two researchers will analyze Lewiston Housing administrative data as well as participant surveys to learn if people are leasing more quickly, remain housed longer and are able to exercise greater housing choice with the flexibility of meeting other needs.

“ Whatever claims that we make, we want to make sure that they’re backed by evidence rather than just gut feeling,” Sen said. “Generally, the hope is that this could have a really big positive impact. We are looking at studies that have already been done in other cities and it seems quite promising. So, we’re hopeful that we might see certain promising effects even in Lewiston.”

Coombs said they want their research to round out what’s in administrative records with the bigger picture, namely where people are demographically, economically and socially. He also said “the answer” to public rental assistance will not be as simple as “just doing direct rental assistance” instead of traditional vouchers.

“Any policy will have pluses and minuses,” Coombs said. “This kind of work helps us learn something causal — direct rental assistance did this — and here’s how you can make it work, and here’s maybe how it doesn’t work.

“Information from Lewiston, as well as the many other communities all over the country eventually doing it, will help big-picture policymakers make the best choices.”

Heynen and the two researchers pointed to a model in Philadelphia called PHLHousing+ which has been providing cash rental assistance to over 300 low-income families since 2022. University of Pennsylvania researchers found that since the private program began, tenants’ rates of eviction were lowered significantly compared with families who received no assistance. 

The most telling data out of the program was that 100% of households were able to use the cash subsidy compared to about 25% of families who were offered vouchers and could not find a unit to lease.

Heynen said HUD is looking at this pilot, and another recently approved program in Reno, Nevada, as a potential future model for housing assistance.

“If they see that these pilots are successful,” Heynen said, “they may make changes to existing voucher programs to allow for all housing authorities to deliver housing assistance this way. Or they may create new programs based on this.”