Moving to Work

In May 2021, HUD announced that AMHA was selected for the Stepped and Tiered Cohort of the Moving To Work Expansion. The Cohort will evaluate alternative rent policies designed to increase resident self-sufficiency and reduce public housing agency (PHA) administrative burdens. It includes PHAs with 1,001 or more aggregate units of public housing and housing choice voucher (HCV) units. AMHA has 4,321 public housing units and 5,207 HCV units.  MTW will provide us the opportunity to design and test innovative, locally designed strategies that use Federal dollars more efficiently, help residents find employment and become self-sufficient, and increase housing choices for low-income families. MTW will allow waivers from many existing public housing and voucher rules.

The Department’s vision for the MTW demonstration is to evaluate program innovations (i.e., MTW activities) being implemented at the PHA level, learn from those innovations, and then offer innovations proven to be successful to all 3,000+ PHAs across the country. To date, the MTW demonstration has had a strong influence in improving the delivery of low-income housing, specifically through the public housing and housing choice voucher programs. Large-scale regulatory reforms have relied in part on MTW PHAs having tested local policy changes that have been found to be beneficial to PHAs and the communities in which they serve, such as the Housing Opportunities through Modernization Act (HOTMA), Administrative Streamlining Rule, COVID-19 emergency waivers, and more.