The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program gives ongoing rent subsidies to low-income households for use in private-market rental units. In 2012, 2.3 million households were renting units with HCV subsidies, making HCV larger than any other U.S. low-income housing program (HUD, 20120).

The program is administered by several thousand local Public Housing Authorities (PHAs). The PHAs screen program applicants for eligibility, manage wait-lists for vouchers, issue vouchers, counsel recipients on voucher program processes, and pay participating landlords.

HCV wait-lists have open periods for eligible households to gain entry to the list through a lottery or some other selection process. Some households are eventually notified that a voucher has been issued to them. To successfully lease a unit with a voucher, three things must be true: the monthly rent of the unit must be under the allowable rent threshold, the unit must meet requirements for physical housing quality, and the landlord must agree to participate in the program (Schwartz, 2010, 176).

Surprisingly, few HCV-eligible households will receive the subsidy. The selection process for the wait-list excludes some eligible households. Not all wait-listed households will complete all of the steps required to receive voucher support. Further, some eligible households will not even apply for the subsidy.

Several measures can give an estimate of the number of households that could be eligible for HCV either by income or housing instability. For instance, it is estimated that over 6 million very low-income households lack affordable rental units (Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2011, 6). In 2011, 1.5 million individuals used homeless shelter and transitional housing programs (HUD, 2012a). In most counties in the U.S., full-time minimum-wage employment does not provide enough income to keep rental-cost burden under 30% of income (NLIHC, 2012, 2).

Because the demand for housing vouchers exceeds the supply, the Housing Choice Voucher program allocates available subsidies through several rationing mechanisms. Initially, eligibility criteria and application processes ration access to those who are eligible and who complete the application process. In most PHAs, a subset of the application pool is selected to form the wait-list, or queue, for HCV. Selection procedures further ration HCV access. Then waiting rations access to those who remain in the queue long enough to be issued a voucher. Search and leasing processes further ration access to households that successfully find an appropriate apartment unit to lease with their voucher.

These rationing mechanisms can be related to various components of a queuing system as described by queuing theory. This paper takes a novel approach by describing the HCV system as a queuing system that rations access to HCV. The framework of queuing theory will be used to organize existing research findings and highlight similarities and differences between the conventional HCV program and other related voucher programs that have received considerable attention in the literature.