This request is a collaboration with independent researcher Julia Kieserman.

Public housing authorities have the ability to remove tenants from public housing and voucher programs, and have broad discretion in their policies for taking such actions. Little is known, however, about how often this happens, for what reasons, and how those frequencies or reasons vary by public housing authority.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) maintains a database system called the Enterprise Income Verification (EIV) system, whose stated purpose is “to support up-front income verification by providing income information to be used by [public housing authorities] during tenant recertification as well as related tools to be used in identifying possible dual entitlement situations and whether applicants already are receiving HUD rental housing assistance.”

The system also contains a “Debts Owed to PHA’s and Terminations” module, which “allows users to access information concerning former tenants who left owing a debt to a PHA or who had their voucher terminated for cause.” Among the records available for each termination are the following fields:

Our FOIA request 📄 to HUD seeks database records matching the fields listed above, for all entries in the module. (We explicitly are not requesting personally-identifiable information regarding any former tenant recorded in the module, such as the name, former address, or Social Security Number.)

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