“Hell.”
That’s how Zenobia Wilson described the last few months.
In late-September, her landlord said he wouldn’t renew her lease and planned to sell the condo Wilson and her three kids – one young adult son and two school-aged daughters – called home for two years. They had until Oct. 31 to move out.
She scrambled to find her family a place to live, with no luck.
The deadline came and went. Wilson had to choose between overstaying or leaving her family without a roof over their heads. By Thanksgiving, the landlord was losing patience.
“I literally have nowhere to go,” she told WHRO in November. “If I had the proper funds to put me and my children up in a hotel and put our stuff in storage, then I would have done that.”
Every rejection teetered her family closer to the edge of homelessness. Application fees for apartments added up.
One challenge: She was trying to rent with a housing choice voucher, federal assistance formerly known as Section 8. Wilson first received a voucher in 2022 when she moved out of Tidewater Gardens — a public housing complex that has since been demolished as part of Norfolk’s redevelopment of the St. Paul’s area.
She dreamed of moving her kids to a better neighborhood with better schools and more opportunities. That promise of choice was pushed by Norfolk city and housing authority officials as Tidewater Gardens residents were relocated.
And that’s supposed to be the idea behind the Housing Choice Voucher program, said Melissa Bonfiglio, director of litigation at Legal Aid Society of Eastern Virginia.
One of the goals is to give lower income families the opportunity to live “outside areas of poverty or minority concentration,” according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which runs the program.
“In theory, vouchers are great because they give somebody the ability to move into a higher economic area,” Bonfiglio said. “The person with a voucher has the choice of where to live within the city, versus just being in this one public housing community.”
But the housing market in Hampton Roads isn’t set up to afford voucher holders much choice at all, according to a new analysis.
“The practical reality of it is that voucher holders still end up in areas of high poverty concentrations, because the other places are just priced out,” Bonfiglio said.
Structural constraints
WHRO enlisted the help of John Finn, a sociology professor at Christopher Newport University who has studied housing and racial geography in Hampton Roads for years, to map where the region’s voucher-eligible housing stock is located.
In other words: If you had a housing voucher, where would you most likely be able to find a place to live?
Using Census data and HUD’s standard rent allowances, Finn found that most of the region’s voucher-eligible units are in high poverty and more racially segregated areas.
Across Hampton Roads, a 10% increase in poverty corresponds to a nearly 14% increase in voucher-eligible units.
The map below compares voucher-eligible units and poverty. Voucher-eligible units are in shades of red, with the darker color denoting a higher percentage of units. Poverty is shown in shades of green, with the darker color denoting higher poverty. Move the slider right to left to compare.
Regionwide, a 10% increase in the Black population share corresponds with a nearly 6% increase in voucher-eligible units. The opposite is true when the population gets whiter. A 10% increase in the white population share corresponds with a decrease of 5% in voucher-eligible units.
Finn emphasized that while poverty and race correspond to higher rates of voucher-eligible housing, one isn’t causing the other.
“The causes are historical, they're cultural, they're policy-related,” he said. “A lot of the causes are just straight up racism. There's lots of different things that cause these associations, but what we're actually measuring are the associations themselves.”
On the map below, voucher-eligible units are in shades of red, with the darker color denoting a higher percentage of units. The Black population is shown in shades of blue, with the darker color signaling a higher percentage of Black population share. Move the slider right to left to compare.
Finn has previously partnered with journalists for similar analyses of housing, segregation and voucher use, including a 2021 series by the Virginian-Pilot which explored how historic racial segregation in Norfolk has been reinforced by modern housing and education decisions.
Finn’s latest analysis is solely based on rent prices. Other factors may rule out otherwise-qualifying units for voucher use, such as failing to pass the housing inspections required by the voucher program, meaning the actual number of eligible units is likely lower than just those under the rent cap.
The analysis shows that the housing market in Hampton Roads overall isn’t structured to support HUD’s goals of deconcentrating poverty and racially integrating neighborhoods, said Finn.
“Almost all the HCV-eligible housing units are in highly segregated, high poverty neighborhoods, and then we go around talking about ‘choice,’ as if people who use vouchers have the choice to go anywhere that they want,” he said. “Really what we're doing is we're blaming them for not going to better neighborhoods when they don't have the opportunity to do that in the first place.”
An 'illusion of choice'
A housing voucher is like a ticket for rent, Bonfiglio said. The tenant pays a set portion of rent based on their income, and the voucher covers the rest.
“You have sort of this triangular relationship between the tenant, the landlord and the housing authority,” she said.
The federal program is run by HUD, but each city has its own housing authority that distributes the funds. HUD determines the rent allowances for each area. It used to be a flat rate, but now it’s based on zip code.
In a Norfolk coffee shop, Wilson, the single mother looking for a new home, brought up the table breaking down HUD’s fair market rents on a laptop screen. She pointed to the amount provided for a 3-bedroom in zip code 23504 in Norfolk. “It says the cap for your voucher would be $2,000.”
The cap, she said, includes monthly expenses like utilities, so voucher holders have to subtract a few hundred dollars to get their max rent amount.
“If I find something $1,900, $1,700, I could apply for that,” she said.
HUD does allow for some flexibility when it comes to rent allowances, said Lynn Carter, the rental housing administrator for the city of Virginia Beach. Regional housing authorities can offer a little more than HUD’s standard rate on a case-by-case basis.
Regional housing authorities work with landlords and help voucher holders through the leasing process, said Anita Baker, interim executive director of the Suffolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority.
But in a competitive market with a limited supply of affordable units, like Hampton Roads, that process can take time, Baker said.
Even when Wilson found apartments that met the rent limit, she hit roadblocks: Her credit score was too low, she didn’t meet the income requirements or the apartment being sold as a 3-bedroom was actually a 2-bedroom with a partitioned living room.
Or, she just never heard back at all.
Voucher holders have at least 60 days to find housing. If they can’t find a place to live in that timeframe, or run out of extensions, they lose the voucher, Bonfiglio said.
Cynthia Alston nearly ran out of time looking for housing in Chesapeake. She toured places but they weren’t “up to par,” she said. Sometimes they smelled of cigarette smoke, or they had pest issues, or they weren’t well-maintained. Alston, who’s almost 70, more recently wanted to find a place with an elevator but had to settle for a place with stairs.
“I had to take what was available to me,” she said. But she said the voucher program was still a “godsend.”
Virginia has safeguards in place meant to protect people using housing choice vouchers. Landlords can’t turn someone away based on the source of income – if the person is subsidizing rent with a voucher, for example.
Advocates say it happens anyway.
A group of testers with HOME of Virginia, a non-profit, called properties to see if they turned people away based on their source of income. They looked for outright denial or indicators of denial, said Moriah Wilkins, a staff attorney at HOME of Virginia.
The non-profit filed a lawsuit in 2024 against apartment complex College Square in Virginia Beach, after the property told testers they “did not accept or only in limited circumstances accepted housing vouchers,” according to a press release. College Square and HOME of Virginia reached a settlement last summer.
“You can't siphon off voucher holder units and then say everything else is not available to voucher holders anymore,” Wilkins said.
Miscalculated income requirements — intentionally or unintentionally — more commonly turn people away, she said. Wilkins noted properties that require applicants to make three times the rent should look at the voucher holder’s portion, not the full rent amount.
For example, if the total rent is $2,000 a month, but the voucher holder’s portion is $300, three times the rent would be a monthly income of $900 — not $6,000.
Source-of-income protections are a good starting point, Bonfiglio said. But just because a voucher holder finds a place to live doesn’t mean they’ll stay there. A landlord could raise the rent, choose not to fix maintenance issues or decide to not renew the lease, she noted.
“A voucher is certainly not an equal replacement for the loss of a public housing unit,” Bonfiglio said.
"A lot of work that needs to happen"
Housing vouchers have been a topic of controversy in recent years amidst redevelopment projects in Hampton Roads.
A 2021 study by The Virginian-Pilot found that Norfolk’s former public housing residents were given vouchers and mostly ended up in poorer, more racially segregated areas than they were in before.
Former Tidewater Gardens residents sued the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority in 2020, arguing the city’s plan to relocate them fell short and violated the federal Fair Housing Act. NRHA settled the suit in 2021.
Young Terrace and Calvert Square, two other public housing complexes in the St. Paul’s area, will also be torn down for the redevelopment project. Since settling the lawsuit in 2021, the city has promised to do things differently when it comes time for those residents to move, including having new housing built before residents have to move.
Susan Perry, Norfolk’s director of Housing and Community Development, told members of the St. Paul’s Area Committee at its Feb. 17 meeting the city will apply the “lessons learned” from Tidewater Gardens to Young Terrace and Calvert Square.
“There is a lot of work that needs to happen before residents get that first notice of needing to relocate,” Perry said, noting the city is still in the input phase of preparing the remaining neighborhoods for redevelopment.
NRHA, which manages Wilson’s subsidy, didn’t respond to requests for comment on the voucher program.
Wilson is a member of the advocacy group New Virginia Majority, which has pressured the city and housing authority over its handling of the redevelopments. She hopes the city does more to prepare those residents for the realities of using a housing voucher, like offering credit repair workshops.
“It does open your eyes to a better way of living,” she said of the housing choice voucher program. “But it also puts you in la-la land. You think you can go get this three bedroom, two bath house with a big back yard, and then you apply for it and get denied.”
Wilson said, at the end of the day, the voucher program worked for her. She found a new apartment east of downtown Norfolk for her and her two daughters in December. They moved in January, and everyone is settling in after months of uncertainty, Wilson said.
She said she likes the new neighborhood. It’s quiet — except for the trains.
“All night long, we hear the train,” she said. “Sometimes, it shakes our apartment.”
The endless rumbling is a reminder that, despite the voucher program’s promises, this wasn’t their first choice.
