U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Designates DCA as a High Performer for its Section 8 Program Management

• Posted on: 01/13/2025

DCA’s Division of Housing and Community Resources Received a Perfect Score by HUD

TRENTON, NJ – The New Jersey Department of Community Affairs (DCA) today announced that DCA’s Division of Housing and Community Resources was named a High Performer by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for its performance as a public housing agency (PHA). The designation is based on HUD’s scoring criteria outlined in the annual Section 8 Management Assessment Program (SEMAP). DCA scored 100 out of 100 points for its outstanding performance in 2024.

“DCA’s exceptional track record of administering HUD’s Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Section 8 program is a model for other programs that are administered to assist New Jersey residents,” said DCA Commissioner Jacquelyn A. Suárez. “DCA’s HCV program has helped many veterans, low-income families, people with disabilities, and older adults find safe, affordable housing in the private market. Each voucher means a family gains a place to call home, nurturing hope for a better future.”

New Jersey’s HCV Section 8 program is one of the largest in the nation, distributing over 24,000 vouchers with a budget exceeding $300 million annually. This budget allowed DCA to serve military veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and families. In October 2024, HUD celebrated its 50^thanniversary in serving the national public through the Housing Choice Voucher (HVC) program.  

“The program’s success is thanks to a dedicated staff who do more than follow HUD guidelines. They lead the way by creating paths that provide better service to our residents,” said DCA Assistant Commissioner and Director of the Division of Housing and Community Resources Janel Winter. “The DCA team has built a foundation of best practices based on data-driven insights that measure standard service, then initiates changes that build upon the groundwork to further increase efficiency and impact in the communities they serve.”

In the past decade, DCA has grown its HCV Section 8 program significantly. In 2024, DCA issued 25 percent more housing vouchers and increased its budget allocation by 50 percent over the prior ten years. Additionally, the housing assistance staff has doubled. 

According to HUD, SEMAP measures the performance of public housing agencies (PHAs) that administer the Housing Choice Voucher program in 14 key areas. These indicate whether PHAs are effective in assisting eligible families to afford decent rental units at a reasonable subsidized cost as intended by federal housing legislation.

The 14 key indicators of PHA performance are:

• Proper selection of applicants from the Housing Choice Voucher waiting list
• Sound determination of reasonable rent for each unit leased
• Establishment of payment standards within the required range of the HUD fair market rent
• Accurate verification of family income
• Timely annual reexaminations of family income
• Correct calculation of the tenant share of the rent and the housing assistance payment
• Maintenance of a current schedule of allowances for tenant utility costs
• Verification that units comply with the housing quality standards before families and PHAs obligate to housing contracts
• Timely annual housing quality inspections
• Performance of quality control inspections to ensure housing quality
• Verification that landlords and tenants promptly correct housing quality deficiencies
• Verification that all available housing choice vouchers are used
• Expansion of housing choice outside areas of poverty or minority concentration, and
• Enrollment of families in the family self-sufficiency (FSS) program as required and help FSS families achieve increases in employment income

DCA received excellent performance results all around but scored exceptionally high in areas like performing quality control inspections to ensure housing quality and expanding housing choice outside areas of poverty or minority concentration.

Some key accomplishments of DCA’s Housing Choice Vouchers (HCV) program this year include modifying the HCV program based on best practices that are driven by data, providing housing navigators to help tenants find available units in the housing marketplace, building relationships with landlords to increase available units, adopting a progressive criminal background look-back period to be more equitable, and adopting Small Area Fair Market Rents in mandatory metropolitan areas, as determined by HUD, to open housing opportunities in more communities across the state.

The Division of Housing and Community Resources, which administers the HCV Section 8 program, strengthens and revitalizes communities through the delivery of affordable housing, supportive services, and the provision of financial and technical assistance to communities, local government and community-based organizations. 

DCA offers a wide range of programs and services, including local government management and finance, affordable housing production, fire safety, building safety, community planning and development, disaster recovery and mitigation, historic preservation, and information privacy.

For more information about DCA, visit https://nj.gov/dca/ or follow the Department on social media: