On a recent afternoon, Mike Vaught and his wife, Miranda, stopped for a friendly chat with Shelia Hawkins outside the Oklahoma City bungalow she rents from them. Vaught can’t remember how long he’s known her. Hawkins was once his grandfather’s tenant, and he has memories of her from when he was a child.
Vaught brought her to one of his properties a couple of years ago, where a Section 8 voucher helps cover her rent.
“They’re like family to me,” said Hawkins, looking at the Vaughts with a smile.
For 20 years, Vaught has rented the majority of his 19 properties to families with Section 8 rental subsidy vouchers. The federally funded vouchers are paid by local housing authorities to landlords to help low-income families secure housing. Those with vouchers typically stay in a unit longer than the average tenant, and the Vaughts appreciate the opportunity to build lasting relationships with the families.
However, the number of landlords renting to voucher participants has stagnated in recent years, housing authority officials told The Frontier.
It’s hard enough for the tens of thousands of families on a waitlist to secure one of the coveted vouchers. Lack of federal funding has forced some housing authorities to indefinitely close their waitlists, while others have only enough funding to help those with priority status for vouchers because they’re experiencing homelessness or have a disability.
But even for those who receive a voucher, housing isn’t a guarantee.
Oklahoma has a shortage of affordable housing options. And housing officials say the number of landlords participating in the Section 8 program isn’t keeping up with the climbing demand. Some voucher participants are struggling to find someone who will rent to them.
Since 2020, nearly 8,000 Section 8 vouchers — also known as Housing Choice vouchers — have expired across the state before the participant could secure a lease, according to data from the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency and three of Oklahoma’s largest housing authorities.
Voucher participants typically have anywhere from 60 to 120 days to find a landlord who will accept their voucher and sign a lease, with the possibility of a 60-day extension. However, even that is not long enough for some. In 2024 alone, nearly 900 people saw their housing vouchers expire from four of Oklahoma’s largest housing authorities. Participants can reapply for a voucher if theirs expires, as long as the housing authority’s waitlist is open. Both the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency’s and the Tulsa Housing Authority’s waitlists are currently closed due to long wait times and funding shortages.
While individual reasons for why a voucher expires aren’t always tracked by the authorities, a spokesperson for the Tulsa Housing Authority told The Frontiermost, if not all, of the expirations are because the participant wasn’t able to find a home where their voucher would be accepted within the allotted time frame.
“One of the quickest, most effective ways to combat the affordable housing deficit is for more landlords (and) property owners to accept Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers,” wrote Ginny Hensley, the vice president of communication at the Tulsa Housing Authority.
Lack of affordable housing in Oklahoma
Karey Landers, executive director of the Apartment Association of Central Oklahoma, which represents property owners and managers across the state, has worked in the rental housing market for over two decades. At the start of her career, she managed a tax-credit property that regularly accepted voucher participants as tenants. Options for affordable housing were on the rise, she said, with a steady stream of tax-credit developers coming to the state to build in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This has dwindled over the past decade or so.
Oklahoma has a deficit of about 77,000 affordable rental units. The largest gaps for those who are extremely low income are concentrated in the state’s largest cities, including Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Norman, according to the most recent state data.
Oklahoma also stands to lose as many as 1,352 affordable housing units over the next five years as contracts signed in the 1990s for the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program expire, according to numbers provided by the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency. This is on top of the 1,106 contracts that expired between 2020 and 2024. The contracts require developers to maintain the affordability of participating units for a minimum of 30 years in exchange for tax credits. But as the contracts expire, many affordable housing developers are selling their properties to owners who choose to discontinue their participation in the program, Landers said.
“I’ve seen more leave than I have come in,” Landers said. “So I do think that has hurt the overall voucher program.”
Not enough landlords participating in Section 8
Many low-income families are being priced out of the already limited housing.
The average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Oklahoma has increased by nearly 30% since 2020. Pandemic-era rent markups haven’t leveled out as much as some housing officials expected, and often landlords will charge as much as the market will bear. Rising inflation and insurance prices also have forced some landlords to hike their rents to make up for the additional costs, Landers said. Many are choosing not to lease to voucher participants, finding they can earn more from the open market.
“If I can get $10 more, I’ll take it,” said David Kinnard, a landlord with about 800 units between Oklahoma City and Norman. “That’s kind of what businessmen do.”
Kinnard stopped leasing to voucher participants at most of his properties over a decade ago, saying the process was strenuous and expensive for landlords.
After a landlord agrees to lease to a voucher participant, the unit is inspected for approval using the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s housing quality standards, which ensure a property is safe for occupation.
“When the repairs are being made, there’s no rent coming in,” Kinnard said. “Why go through the hoops?”
Lengthy inspections are often the biggest deterrent for landlords, Landers said. She said it can take anywhere from one to three weeks to have a unit inspected, not including time for necessary repairs. It may take only 24 to 48 hours to get a tenant who isn’t renting with help from a voucher moved into a unit, she said.
A spokesperson for the Tulsa Housing Authority said the inspections look for health and safety issues within the unit that would likely need to be addressed regardless of whether the property participates in Section 8. The Tulsa Housing Authority supplies landlords interested in participating in Section 8 with a checklist to review before the inspection. If the landlord checks off each item, such as having working door locks and functioning windows, the spokesperson said they have a 99% chance of being approved.
Kathy Holt, the Tulsa Housing Authority’s landlord liaison, recruited over a hundred landlords to the voucher program in 2024. Still, she says there’s a need for more Section 8 units to meet the high demand, which is why the housing authority is actively working to recruit more landlords, particularly those with multi-family units.
“We’re really trying to recruit in a bigger way,” Holt said.
Benefits for landlords
The Tulsa Housing Authority made strides over the past few years to recruit landlords into its Section 8 program by hosting monthly educational events and hiring Holt as their liaison to facilitate regular communication with landlords.
The authority even awarded over $200,000 between 2023 and 2024 in sign-on bonuses to landlords. A spokesperson for the authority said they hope to offer the bonuses again in the future if they receive additional funding for the incentives.
Holt accepted Section 8 tenants throughout her 25 years as a landlord. Now she uses her experience to recruit landlords into the program. She attributes the current deficit to a lack of awareness of the program and its benefits for landlords, such as consistent payments from the housing agency and stable occupancy.
“I just loved it,” Holt said of her time participating in Section 8. “It worked for me. So I thought I could help.”
Unlike tenants from the open market, Section 8 tenants are backed by federal dollars. Even if the tenant loses their job, the landlord will continue receiving rent payments, according to an official from the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency.
The average length of tenancy for voucher participants is generally between 7 and 9 years, compared to just 2.5 years on the rental market. This means potential savings up to $10,800, given the standard price to turn over a unit ranges between $500 and $3000, according to a Tulsa Housing Authority spokesperson.
There were over 10,000 people on the Tulsa Housing Authority’s voucher waitlist and over 18,000 on the Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency’s at the end of 2024; landlords will have no problem increasing their occupancy, Holt said. The authority hosts weekly events for voucher-friendly landlords to advertise their properties to potential tenants.
“Even when I had 1,500 properties that I managed here in Tulsa, we could fill them up,” Holt said. “That’s the reason it worked for me, and this is what I teach the owners.”
‘It’s worth it’
Vaught and his son built the wooden front porch of Hawkins’ Oklahoma City home. She loves to decorate it each Halloween and Christmas so her grandchildren have a festive place to visit.
“I love them,” Hawkins said of the couple. “If I can keep them forever, I’ll keep them forever.”
After 20 years in the business, this is why Vaught continues to lease to voucher participants. The consistent payments that arrive “like clockwork” each month and the housing authority’s assistance if issues arise with a tenant are both advantages of the Section 8 program. But the Vaughts say the real benefit is longer tenancies, which allow the couple to build lasting relationships with their tenants and — they hope — give someone a leg up during what may be a difficult time.
“If we could help a few people get back on their feet,” Vaught said. “It’s worth it.”
The Frontier is a nonprofit newsroom that produces fearless journalism with impact in Oklahoma. Read more at www.readfrontier.org.