Junchang Tan felt the weight lift from his shoulders the day he moved out of the around-100-square-foot, single-room-occupancy hotel room he had shared with his wife and children for nearly a decade.
Yet, just three years after seeing his family featured in a national news report for upgrading from the cramped residential hotel with the help of a pandemic-era fund, he found himself back at square one.
The federal Emergency Housing Voucher Program, which helped Tan move to an apartment with enough space for his family of four, is ending sooner than planned. Funding intended to last 10 years is expected to dry up this year after just five.
The abrupt cutoff has left 920 San Francisco voucher recipients, many of whom were among the city’s most at risk for homelessness before entering the program, in confusion and despair, as many accepted the voucher believing it would provide long-term rental support.
City housing agencies are working to transition recipients of this soon-to-expire housing voucher to permanent housing. Anne Stanley, spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development and the San Francisco Housing Authority, wrote in a statement that the city plans to add voucher recipients to waiting lists for two federal housing programs starting in April, once the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development approves.
City funding will fill the gap between the end of the emergency voucher and the start of the new programs.
“City bridge funding will provide rent subsidies starting this fall,” she wrote. While the transition could take longer depending on HUD’s approval timeline, officials estimate that the remaining households will move to new programs by May 2027.
Tan was cautious with his expectations. He has been waiting months for an update from housing officials. “If I get my hopes up, I might end up more disappointed,” he said in Cantonese, adding that he has been preparing for the worst-case scenario since receiving notice that the program would end.
The half-dozen voucher recipients, including Tan, who spoke with the Public Press expressed some relief that the immediate threat of losing their rent subsidies in coming months could be eased, but said they remained wary of the uncertainty ahead. Most said that they accepted this voucher believing the subsidies would provide secure housing, only now having to repeat the process — again fearing the loss of their homes and navigating the stressful process of finding a new place to live.
“We all thought the voucher was long term,” Tan said. “So, when we heard about this, we felt a sense of helpless regret. Things ended up this way for no reason, and even with a transition period, it will still be tough.”
Uncertain path to long-term housing
Launched in 2021 through a federal COVID-19 relief fund, the Emergency Housing Choice Voucher program was modeled after the Section 8 housing voucher program, a long-term subsidy that ensures participants pay no more than 30% of their income on rent. Demand for traditional Section 8 vouchers far exceeds the available supply nationwide.
This pandemic-era program followed the same rules as Section 8 but prioritized housing vulnerable populations, including those with urgent housing needs and survivors of domestic violence.
Many recipients assumed that the Emergency Housing Choice Voucher program, which began with a $5 billion allocation and was intended to last until 2030, could be relied upon for continuous support. But as rents rose much faster than expected while incomes remained stagnant, the government ended up paying more, and funding was projected to run out early.
Last March, HUD announced that funding for the program would run out sooner than expected, and that it had no plan to renew it. The agency had already stopped issuing vouchers to new recipients when current participants left the program.
Housing advocates expected the program to be renewed once it expired, which some lawmakers attempted in last year’s budget negotiations. But Congress did not adopt that proposal in the summer budget reconciliation bill.
The San Francisco Housing Authority, operating under the assumption that the program would last the full decade, also had not planned to move participants into other permanent subsidy programs. But the agency, which last October sent tenants letters alerting them to the October 2026 funding cutoff, now faces the urgent need to transition voucher recipients into permanent housing — a process that typically takes years — in just a few months.
Stanley of the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Economic Development said the city planned to add recipients to waitlists for two other federally subsidized programs. The process will begin in April if HUD approves a waiver that will allow local officials to automatically enroll them.
One program is the Tenant Protection Voucher, which works similarly to Section 8. Congress approved funding this month to allow emergency voucher recipients to access it. Tenants who secure the voucher would receive their subsidy funding from a new source and not need to move.
Still, that funding would not cover all Emergency Housing Choice Voucher recipients who need a transition, and it is unclear how much funding the city could receive. San Francisco also planned to add recipients to a waiting list for project-based vouchers, which are tied to apartments in the city’s federally subsidized housing stock. Tenants would need to relocate to those units as they become available over time.
While Stanley noted that recipients would receive “ample notice, moving assistance, and connections to service providers throughout the process,” the transition still might have significant challenges.
At a Feb. 5 meeting of the San Francisco Housing Authority’s Board of Commissioners, Executive Director Dan Adams said the abrupt program cancellation added administrative burdens for staff. He highlighted the difficulty of communicating with residents and managing the timeline, particularly given the questions over federal funding and the process for shifting subsidies.
“The uncertainty has actually really been challenging for us to figure out,” Adams said. He added that it was difficult to give updates to tenants who are directly affected. “Is this the time to reach out to residents when we don’t know everything?”
Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, called the city’s plan good news, saying it focuses on keeping people housed as long as they need. “Local officials are trying, authentically, to make some lemonade out of the lemons they’ve been dealt by the federal government,” she said.
Yet Friedenbach is worried about other potential effects, as the city would need to divert all openings in project-based voucher units to this group. “If they weren’t cutting this program, new project-based vouchers that open up would be going to homeless people,” she said.
She also expressed caution about the “ongoing complications” that could arise during the transition, especially since many recipients may need to move to neighborhoods with available project-based voucher units and possibly repeat parts of the application process to qualify for the new subsidy. She noted that many have experienced violence and trauma before accepting the program, adding that “stability is of utmost importance to them, and this is really destabilizing.”
‘I would never have moved’
For Jessica Boykin, the stability that comes with housing has given her a chance to rebuild her life.
Boykin, 35, has lived through hardships she once thought could crush her. She survived domestic violence and has been homeless twice. She moved between the streets, her father’s home and shelters in different cities while raising her four children alone.
Determined to get her life back together, Boykin searched relentlessly for help and landed in a permanent supportive housing unit. She ultimately chose an emergency housing voucher over other options to secure what she thought would be a permanent home, a decision she now fears could put her back on the streets.
“If I had known what I know now about this voucher, I would never have moved,” she said.
In the two years she has used the voucher, Boykin said, many opportunities began to open up. She kept a stable job, developed a routine to care for her children and began to plan for a future, one in which she no longer needed rental subsidies.
Losing that support after two years would wipe out that momentum, replacing it with the stress of housing insecurity. “I feel like I’m going to lose everything,” she said. “I just need that stability for a few more years.”
Now Boykin’s only hope is to wait for the housing authority to update its formal plan to move voucher recipients to long-term housing solutions. Over the past few months, she has sought resources on her own. But she realized that it would be harder to be prioritized for other programs because they typically give preference to those who have recently lost their housing, which has not yet happened for her.
Leaving people with no options
In research published by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, researcher Christi Economy highlighted the many harms of ending the Emergency Housing Choice Voucher program early, including that it could push already vulnerable tenants back into homelessness and create a “cliff” for them.
“Folks weren’t expecting this resource to run out,” Economy said. “It’s leaving people without any options.”
That feeling of living on the edge is one shared by Lily Wu, a voucher recipient who in 2023 moved out of a cramped residential hotel which she had lived in for more than a decade with her husband and three children.
“It feels like we’re in a boat stranded in the middle of the sea, unable to reach either shore,” she said, using a Cantonese idiom to describe her feeling of being stuck with no way forward.
Wu gave up a chance to join the waitlist for permanent housing, a process begun when her husband submitted an application decades ago, because by the time her family received the long-awaited notice, she had already moved into a new home with an emergency housing voucher. Now, she regrets the decision: Getting back on the waitlist would take too long, and she cannot return to her old residential hotel, where rents have risen and the landlord no longer allows more than two tenants.
Even with a city plan to transition residents into units with long-term housing, Wu said she worried it could mean leaving Chinatown, where her job, her in-laws and children’s school are located. She also relies on neighborhood-based support services available in her language. She said she feared facing a difficult decision, either to move or lose the subsidy.
“All the decisions are made by the government — we can’t decide anything,” she said. “But at the very least, I just hope we can keep our home.”