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The Affordable Housing Advocacy Project in Berkeley released its first progress report on Christmas Day, promising to promote and improve the use of housing vouchers for low-income residents. 

“We are especially concerned that city staff and elected officials and, most importantly, voucher holders do not understand how the vouchers work,” according to the AHAP report. 

A so-called Section 8 voucher is a government rental subsidy that allows a low-income person to obtain housing, with federal financial assistance, in a privately owned building. 

Life in privately owned housing is viewed by many as preferable to life in a government housing project, which is perceived as dangerous because of the threat of violent crime and drug dealing. 

Harvard and Princeton universities jointly released a report in October, concluding that housing vouchers appeared to be succeeding, with families “enjoying more safety, fewer behavior problems among boys, and better health.” 

Former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Assistant Secretary Xavier Briggs, now at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said the positive results have been quick. 

“The theory has always been that it would take years for effects to register,” he said. “But when you leave neighborhoods behind where you’re ducking bullets and worried for your life, and for your children’s lives, every minute of every day, lo and behold it doesn’t take long for things to register at all.” 

In October 1998, President Bill Clinton signed the Quality Housing and Responsibility Act. This required local housing authorities to develop and submit both annual and five-year plans to the federal housing agency. 

One of the requirements is that residents of public housing be included in the planning process. 

Berkeley’s Affordable Housing Advocacy Project, which is funded by the City Council, is working to include public housing tenants and the Section 8 tenants as well. This is particularly true in the development of the city’s five-year and annual housing plans, and in the creation of “Watchdog Committees” to monitor housing activities. 

The project was developed out of the Save Section 8 Committee, a group founded by seniors living in subsidized housing. It was started in October 1999 as a joint project between Housing Rights, Inc., Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency (BOSS), and the National Housing Law Project. 

The group also plans to educate rental property owners regarding vouchers.