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.
Students Describe Months-Long Searches
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.
Washington state law, codified as RCW 59.18.255, bars landlords from refusing to accept Section 8 vouchers and requires them to subtract the voucher amount from a tenant's gross income when calculating rent-to-income ratios, according to MRSC. Even so, a King County report cited by the Times found landlords still regularly refuse to accept the vouchers, and students in the program pay up to one-third of their income toward rent while the voucher covers the rest.
The Federal Mechanism Behind the Vouchers
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.
Tacoma's Program Came First — And Then Ended
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.
Beyond Housing: Emergency Grants and a Food Pantry
Highline also offers emergency grants and runs a food pantry on campus for students facing broader basic-needs insecurity, part of a wider pattern across Washington's community college system. A statewide basic needs survey from the Washington Student Achievement Council and Western Washington University found that 10 percent of the state's higher education students experienced homelessness within a 12-month period, while 54.1 percent of students in the South Puget Sound region reported basic-needs insecurity of some kind. Nationally, a 2022–2023 Hope Center for Student Basic Needs survey of 74 colleges found that 49 percent of college students experienced housing insecurity and 14 percent experienced homelessness in the prior year.
To address the crisis statewide, the Washington Legislature created the Supporting Students Experiencing Homelessness pilot in 2019 and made it permanent and statewide across all 34 public community and technical colleges and universities in 2023, funding campus benefits navigators and emergency grants for unhoused students and former foster youth. Other institutions are testing different models entirely: DePaul USA's Dax Program buys residential buildings near urban campuses to provide communal housing and case management, an approach the nonprofit recently expanded to Denver, in contrast with Highline's tenant-based voucher approach.
