The director of Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency last week told the agency's board that funding is already stretched so far that the housing voucher program isn't operating at full capacity. The agency is authorized for 11,000 vouchers to help low-income Oklahomans afford housing, but sharp rent increases have resulted in the distribution of only 10,200 vouchers. “It really depends on how much Congress appropriates for the program to determine if housing agencies can support the full number of vouchers that they're authorized to contract,” Deborah Jenkins, executive director for the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency, told the Tulsa World.
Jenkins said she doesn’t know of any authority or agency that has the funding to distribute all the vouchers they are authorized to. Department of Housing and Urban Development funding for the program “has decreased over the years" but determines how many families OHFA can serve, Jenkins said. But the agency has to make adjustments as rent continues to climb.
"We may start with 'We can serve 10,200 families this year,' (but) next year if the rent increases continue, ...
we may have to reduce that number further,” Jenkins said. More than 17,000 are on the closed waitlist for the Housing Choice Voucher program. Under the program commonly known as Section 8, tenants generally pay about 30% of their income toward rent while landlords receive a federal voucher for the balance.
Tulsa Housing Authority officials said in 2022 that the voucher.