Feature

RSS

A site’s community room is an ideal place for residents to throw parties or hold resident association meetings. But use of this amenity can cause problems. If residents or their guests act irresponsibly, they may damage the community room and its furnishings. And if someone’s injured while using the community room, your site could be held liable.

Lengthy unexplained household absences from your site can be frustrating and may even violate HUD lease provisions that require assisted households to use their units as their primary residences. You may have households that leave the site for months at a time during particular seasons. Or you may have a tenant serving in the armed forces who has been deployed for a lengthy amount of time. Regardless of the reason for extended absences, you need to be consistent in how ...

HUD regulations have three key requirements when rejecting applicants. Owners must not discriminate against an applicant based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status, or disability. Also, for Section 8 program owners, HUD requires owners to comply with the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). The VAWA protects victims of domestic violence, dating violence, or stalking, as well as their immediate family members, from being denied housing assistance...

By Carolyn Zezima, Esq.

April is National Fair Housing Month, which, according to HUD, is time for people to come together “as a community and a nation to celebrate the anniversary of the passing of the Fair Housing Act (FHA) and recommit to that goal which inspired us in the aftermath of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968: to eliminate housing discrimination and create equal opportunity in every community.”

HUD defines a waiting list as a formal record of applicants for housing assistance or assisted housing units that identifies the applicant’s name, date and time of application, selection preferences claimed, income category, and the need for an accessible unit. The waiting list may be kept in either a bound journal or a computer program [HUD Handbook 4350.3, Glossary]. If your site is considering using an electronic waiting list maintained through a computer, you ...

Since the latest continuing resolution, which funded HUD and several other federal agencies in the absence of enacted Fiscal Year (FY) 2019 appropriations bills, expired on Dec. 21, 2018, Congress and President Trump haven’t enacted a final FY 2019 HUD bill. As a result, funding for HUD has lapsed and a partial government shutdown has ensued. It’s not a complete government shutdown, because Congress has enacted some of its FY 2019 appropriations bills such a...

Inspectors sometimes hit sites with inspection violations (what HUD calls “defects” or “deficiencies”) for conditions that aren’t actually violations or that the inspector shouldn’t have inspected in the first place. This happens because HUD’s inspection standards contained in its Dictionary of Deficiency Definitions aren’t always clear about what parts of a site are subject to inspection and what is and isn’t a viol...

Some sites don’t pursue residents aggressively enough to collect back rent owed and excess assistance. They believe that because residents’ income levels are low and the amounts owed are small, it’s not worth the sites’ time or money to chase after these debts. So these sites may end up with large unpaid resident accounts receivable balances on their books.

According to federal reports issued in June 2018, HUD lacks adequate oversight of lead-based paint in the public housing and Housing Choice Voucher programs. The reports, issued by the HUD Office of Inspector General and U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), described disjointed communication between HUD and the local housing authorities it oversees. Cases of children poisoned by lead aren’t always identified and followed up on in a timely manner.