Housing support voucher programs suffer profoundly in the United States by being unacceptable to many — even most — landlords, whether landlords are legally allowed to ignore them or not.
Housing Choice (a.k.a Section 8) vouchers are often touted as a substitute for social housing that does not ‘interfere’ with the upwards death spiral of rental housing prices. (Heaven forbid!) Their enormous weakness is that the cost to governments, and hence to the taxpayer, is ever-increasing just because they are supporting that upwards death spiral of prices.
In the U.S. they are so badly funded that jurisdictions close their waiting lists for vouchers for long periods of time. Even when the window opens (briefly) to fill the waiting list, applicants will often be picked by lottery because the number of vouchers is miniscule compared with the number who apply.
Can vouchers really be anything other than a short term stopgap measure for true social housing that is designed, not to support the housing free market, but to remove low/no income housing properties from that market completely?
Make up your own mind. The true horror of the voucher system, forgetting the issue of landlords who won’t accept them, is on display in an article from the Seattle Times: Vying For A Golden Ticket: King County Housing Authority Reopens Subsidized Housing Lottery
