San Diego has stopped taking new names for its Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher waitlist, with housing officials saying they cannot responsibly add more applicants as rents climb and federal funding fails to keep pace. The San Diego Housing Commission (SDHC) shut down the online application portal at 11:59 PM on Sunday and emphasized that existing applications will stay active, even though the agency is not pulling new families from the list for the foreseeable future. The move leaves tens of thousands of hopeful renters staring down a much longer wait.
The waitlist has swollen to more than 76,000 people, growing by roughly 1,000 applicants each month, and no households have been selected from the list since August 2022. “We have been receiving insufficient funding to pull new families from our waiting list, and one can even say to sustain the existing families,” Azucena Valladolid, SDHC’s vice president of rental assistance, told KPBS.
SDHC’s wait-list portal confirms the shutdown, noting that the Section 8, public housing and project-based voucher lists all closed at 11:59 PM on Sunday. Any application already submitted remains active. The agency also notes that individuals with disabilities may request extra time to apply; that accommodation window runs through March 4, 2026, and SDHC has set up a dedicated wait-list call center for questions. More information is available from the San Diego Housing Commission.
Budget Squeeze And The Numbers
Local reporting and SDHC materials indicate the commission paid out roughly $310 million in rental assistance in 2025 and served about 17,000 low-income households. At the same time, SDHC says the average voucher subsidy has climbed about 80 percent since 2020, creating a projected $16.9 million shortfall in the coming fiscal year, according to KPBS. All of that plays out inside a national Housing Choice Voucher program that provides rental help to roughly 2.3 million households and about 5 million people, according to a Congress Research Service primer on the program (Congress.gov).
What Could Change For Voucher Holders
To stretch limited federal dollars, SDHC has bundled proposed policy changes into a Moving to Work (MTW) amendment. Agency materials warn that if those changes do not move forward, roughly 1,700 households could lose assistance, according to SDHC Path to Success materials. Local coverage of SDHC’s December vote and subsequent reporting on the MTW plan note that the shift could require working voucher households to pay 30 to 40 percent of their income toward rent and could also raise the share paid by seniors and people with disabilities, a change that some outlets estimated could add about $300 to $600 a month for many families. The coming weeks are expected to center on the formal MTW review process and on what exemptions, hardship protections or supportive services SDHC and its partners might pair with any new policies. For background on the debate, see Hoodline reporting on hikes in rent for Section 8 tenants and coverage from ABC 10News…