John W. Olver: “I would like to remind that the authorizing committee just brought out legislation and has added 20,000 in authorization…”

“I would like to remind that the authorizing committee just brought out legislation and has added 20,000 in authorization for each of the next 5 years. Whether we will have the funding next year to actually provide that money, I do not know, but they're asking for us not only to move upward toward filling the vouchers that presently are authorized, but also adding some additional ones. And the reason for that is that we have 8 million families roughly, 8 million households in this country which are living at incomes below 30 percent of the median income in their areas, and we are only providing somewhere in the range of 2 million, a little bit less even in this funding, of money for rental assistance for those people. So we're not coming anywhere close to dealing with the poorest people who are eligible under the law as it is written for that rental assistance because their income lies below 30 percent of median income in the area involved.”