From time to time, you may need to transfer a household to another unit at your site. For example, if a household has lost members, you may have to transfer it to a smaller unit because it’s no longer eligible to occupy the larger unit. Or you may be required by fair housing law to allow a...
On Aug. 6, HUD issued a notice intended to provide an overview of the recently enacted Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013 (VAWA 2013). The 2013 law expands the number of HUD programs subject to the law’s protections beyond HUD’s public housing and Section 8 tenant-...
It’s likely that a number of the households you certify each year include full-time students who are 18 or older. Certifying these households isn’t complicated. But if you don’t know the specific rules on how to handle full-time students’ income, it’s easy to make...
Households that skip out without paying rent and don’t let you know where they’ve gone and whether they’re coming back can cause big headaches. When a unit is abandoned you have to deal with problems like frozen pipes and more serious health and safety hazards. And you need to...
HUD generally requires you to get Social Security numbers (SSNs) for all members of an applicant household who are at least 6 years old. And HUD requires you to get proof of those numbers and specifies which documents you can accept as proof. But what if a household member was never issued an...
HUD’s “one-strike” rule sets out specific grounds for denying admission to applicants based on certain drug-related and other criminal activity. It requires you to add certain screening criteria to your resident selection plan and lets you add other optional criteria to screen...
HUD rules make it hard for you to pass on the extra cost of emergency repairs to your residents, so you’re the one who will be stuck paying them. Fortunately, you can keep emergency repair costs to a minimum by reducing the number of these repairs your site needs, and by planning ahead to...
According to HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO), disability-related complaints, including those that involve assistance animals, are the most common discrimination complaint they receive. To help explain reasonable accommodation obligations in housing and HUD-funded...
The “sequester,” which has dominated news headlines since the election, is a term used to describe a series of across-the-board federal spending cuts. At the beginning of March, the cuts began to kick in when President Obama and members of Congress were unable to work out a deal. As...
It’s essential to keep keys on hand so that you can enter your site’s units in an emergency. But you’re asking for trouble if you don’t keep careful track of the keys you have for this purpose. An intruder might get hold of a unit key and use it to commit a crime, such as...
When applicants apply to your assisted site, you must give them a written application to fill out, which asks for certain required eligibility and income information. If you don’t get this information, you could end up admitting an ineligible or inappropriate household. And that could mean...
When certifying or recertifying households, you may encounter household members who get alimony or child support from ex-spouses or their children’s parents, or household members who pay alimony or child support to someone else. You need to know how to handle these payments correctly to...
