From The Seattle Times:
After Bilal Ali graduated from high school, he wasn’t able to think about college. His father had just died, leaving him on his own, and he was scrambling to support himself.
When he turned 21, he feared he was missing his chance to get a degree entirely and he enrolled at Highline College in Des Moines. But he still had to work overnight to afford the rent for the two-bedroom apartment in Renton he shared with six older men and he was struggling with so little sleep. Looking back, he doubts he could have finished.
Then, an innovative housing program at the community college changed everything.
Since 2020, Highline College has paired students facing homelessness with housing vouchers provided by the King County Housing Authority, covering their rent for up to four and a half years or until six months after they graduate.
There are 34 community colleges and 37 housing authorities in Washington alone, yet Highline’s is the only program of its kind in the country, experts said.
Fifty students have obtained two- or four-year degrees or certificates in the program’s first five years.
Highline staff argue the results so far show the program is worth the investment.
Community colleges — which serve a broad range of people, including high school students and single parents — can be an affordable path for many to get better jobs. But their students are more likely to struggle with housing. A recent study found 14% of Washington community college students were homeless. At Highline College, it’s 18%.
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Highline College and King County Housing Authority got the idea for the program from a similar partnership in Tacoma. The housing authority there decided to end that program in 2022, but the one at Highline kept going. It’s even expanded from 40 vouchers to 70.
Tacoma and King County have a federally designated special status that allows them to set aside Section 8 housing vouchers for students.
King County administers the rental assistance similarly to its Section 8 housing assistance program: Students find an apartment where they can use the voucher and pay up to a third of their income toward rent. The voucher covers the rest.
But unlike other government-funded housing vouchers, these are time limited and directly tied to the students’ progress in school.
Students have to go to school full time, pass their classes and meet quarterly with an adviser to make sure they’re on track to graduate — either with an associate degree or a bachelor’s of applied science.
Read The Seattle Times' full article.
From Hoodline:
Fourteen percent of Washington community college students have experienced homelessness, but at Highline College in Des Moines, a small group of them are staying in school at nearly double the typical rate thanks to a rare partnership with the King County Housing Authority. Students in the college's housing voucher program returned for a second year at an 89 percent clip during the 2024-2025 school year, compared with 45 percent for comparable students who weren't in the program. The initiative pairs homeless and housing-insecure students with Section 8-style rental vouchers tied directly to their academic progress.
The program, detailed in an investigation by The Seattle Times, covers participating students' rent for up to four and a half years, or until six months after graduation. Saido Alinur, who oversees the housing program at Highline, said the assistance encourages students to finish their degrees rather than drop out to chase stable housing. Eighteen percent of Highline students specifically have experienced homelessness, according to the same reporting, underscoring why the college built the initiative in the first place.
Students accepted into the program must attend school full time, remain on track for an associate degree or bachelor's of applied science, and pass their classes. They're also required to meet quarterly with an adviser, and if they disappear without communicating, Highline staff issue warnings before Alinur can ask the housing authority to terminate the voucher. Since launching, the program has expanded from 40 vouchers to 70, though only about one in four students offered a spot has actually secured housing — a reminder that even with a voucher in hand, finding a landlord willing to accept it in King County's tight rental market remains a real obstacle.
Takayla Lee, who enrolled at Highline at age 28, entered a shelter with her two children before joining the program. She failed her first class and took several months to secure housing, but eventually built momentum studying early childhood education; she now hopes to open her own day care and expects to stay in the program through a four-year degree. Bilal Ali also took several months to find a place before earning his associate degree in multimedia design and graduating through the program; he plans to remain enrolled as he pursues a four-year degree.
Seattle/ Community & Society
Highline College Housing Vouchers Push Student Retention to 89 Percent
By Emily Tran
Published on August 17, 2026
Source: Google Street View
Fourteen percent of Washington community college students have experienced homelessness, but at Highline College in Des Moines, a small group of them are staying in school at nearly double the typical rate thanks to a rare partnership with the King County Housing Authority. Students in the college's housing voucher program returned for a second year at an 89 percent clip during the 2024-2025 school year, compared with 45 percent for comparable students who weren't in the program. The initiative pairs homeless and housing-insecure students with Section 8-style rental vouchers tied directly to their academic progress.
How the Voucher Program Works
The program, detailed in an investigation by The Seattle Times, covers participating students' rent for up to four and a half years, or until six months after graduation. Saido Alinur, who oversees the housing program at Highline, said the assistance encourages students to finish their degrees rather than drop out to chase stable housing. Eighteen percent of Highline students specifically have experienced homelessness, according to the same reporting, underscoring why the college built the initiative in the first place.
Students accepted into the program must attend school full time, remain on track for an associate degree or bachelor's of applied science, and pass their classes. They're also required to meet quarterly with an adviser, and if they disappear without communicating, Highline staff issue warnings before Alinur can ask the housing authority to terminate the voucher. Since launching, the program has expanded from 40 vouchers to 70, though only about one in four students offered a spot has actually secured housing — a reminder that even with a voucher in hand, finding a landlord willing to accept it in King County's tight rental market remains a real obstacle.
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Highline's program can exist at all because the King County Housing Authority holds Moving to Work status from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, a federal designation that gives select public housing authorities statutory flexibility to redesign voucher allocations for local needs, according to the King County Housing Authority. That waiver, established by Congress in 1996, is the same mechanism that let Tacoma pioneer student-specific vouchers years earlier. The King County Housing Authority administers one of the region's largest voucher programs, serving more than 14,800 households in 2025, with over 4,700 vouchers dedicated to specialized populations experiencing homelessness or fleeing domestic violence.
Robin Walls, CEO of the housing authority, said Highline's time-limited, progress-tied voucher model aligns with the Trump administration's support for self-sufficiency-oriented housing assistance, per the Times reporting. The housing authority plans to continue investing in the program even as the administration has reportedly proposed significant budget cuts to housing assistance. Separately, HUD issued a proposed rule in March that would let housing authorities impose Section 8 time limits as short as two years and work requirements up to 40 hours a week, while explicitly exempting full-time college students from those work mandates, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Highline got the idea for its program from a similar partnership in Tacoma, where the Tacoma Housing Authority and Tacoma Community College launched the nation's first college student voucher program, the College Housing Assistance Program, in 2014. CHAP was named one of the Harvard Kennedy School's Top 25 Innovations in American Government in 2018, but the Tacoma Housing Authority voted to end the program in 2022, shifting its funding priorities back toward the general low-income population it serves.
Sara Goldrick-Rab, who reviewed the Tacoma program before it ended, said it showed better outcomes for the students who received housing and that housing can improve students' academic performance once they're stably housed. Experts told the Times that Highline's program is now the only one of its kind operating in the country, though it has not undergone any outside evaluation. The program has so far served 50 students who went on to obtain two- or four-year degrees or certificates.
Zoning You Don’t Control, Funding You Can’t Replace
This week, CLPHA urged HUD to withdraw a change that would adjust the local inflation component of FY27 Renewal Funding Inflation Factors (RFIFs) and reduce Housing Assistance Payment (HAP) funding for families already under lease based on decisions made by units of local government that PHAs neither control nor influence. CLPHA objected to this proposed land use penalty in our comments to HUD on the notice establishing FY26 RFIFs for the Housing Choice Voucher program. The notice also asks whether HUD should refine the local inflation component of the RFIF for FY27 to discount the local inflation adjustment in areas where housing supply appears constrained by land use, permitting, or development approval policies. CLPHA strongly opposed this proposal in our comments.
We recommend that HUD publish RFIFs a year in advance and incorporate private-sector rent data and VMS-reported per unit cost data into the local factor and compare assigned factors against realized cost growth annually. Most importantly, a change of this consequence should not be adopted through the annual RFIF notice. HUD should publish the specific methodology for a full comment period, and should not implement it in the same year it is proposed.
Local Inflation Adjustment Reaches the Wrong Parties
CLPHA’s central objection is that the adjustment reaches the wrong parties. Zoning ordinances, permitting timelines, impact fees, and development approval processes are set by city councils, county boards, planning commissions, and state legislatures—not by PHAs. Most PHAs have no vote and no formal role in those decisions, and many of our members wait in the same permitting queues as private developers when they build or rehabilitate housing.
Geography compounds the problem, since RFIFs are calculated at the FMR area level and a single metropolitan area routinely spans dozens or hundreds of land use jurisdictions, so a central city that has already reformed its zoning could be penalized for its suburbs’ rules.
Data Sources Supporting Inflation Adjustment Does Not Exist
The comments also make the case that HUD has no data source capable of supporting the adjustment. The data sources cited in HUD’s notice include building permits and housing completions. These housing metrics fluctuate based on buyer and renter demand, interest rates, labor availability, and rising material and insurance costs as much as they do from regulatory shifts.. National permit authorizations fell to their lowest evel since May 2020 as the federal funds rate rose above 5 percent, a movement that likely has little to do with zoning.
The outcome measures HUD also lists, such as rent-to-income and price-to-cost ratios, are confounded in the same way. If HUD nevertheless proceeds, we ask that any such factor be applied only as an upward adjustment, never reducing an area’s factor below what the current methodology would produce, and that the methodology and area-level data be published for full notice and comment at least one funding cycle before taking effect. CLPHA also strongly opposes the suggestion that HUD target the change to PHAs above a voucher threshold, which would concentrate the loss on the large agencies serving the most assisted families.
On the current methodology, the comments document a gap members are living with now. Fifty-one members, approximately 60 percent of CLPHA membership, are in areas that received a 0 percent FY 2026 inflation factor. They include one member reporting an approximately 80 percent increase in average HAP payment over three years and another operating at 102 percent budget utilization. For these reasons, we recommend that HUD publish RFIFs a year in advance, incorporate private-sector rent data and VMS-reported per unit cost data into the local factor, release the underlying area-level calculations, and compare assigned factors against realized cost growth annually.
