Historically, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has been associated more with forgettable secretaries and crony development scandals than with improving the lives of the poor. But a seemingly modest proposed federal rule change stands to usher in a new era of upward mobility, in which a low-income tenant can move out of and up from public-housing projects and voucher-paid apartments. The alternative is a system where tenants and their children remain stuck for decades in a subsidy that can legally last a lifetime.

For the first time, all of the more than 3,000 public-housing authorities across the country — which manage physical housing projects and distribute Housing Choice Vouchers to low-income individuals — would be free to adopt work requirements and term limits for their residents. These rules have turned cash welfare from a dead end into a bridge to upward mobility.

“Work requirements and time limits are not punishment,” as HUD Secretary Scott Turner recently said. “Earning a paycheck is empowering. Getting a welfare check is not. We want Americans . . . to build futures defined by independence and stability.”

To understand the importance of the rule change, consider the sheer extent of subsidized housing. The Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program, for instance, distributes cash welfare to 2.8 million recipients. Meanwhile, 9 million beneficiaries receive housing subsidies. Of the total $78 billion HUD budget, $56 billion is allocated to rental assistance. Yet the rules for cash welfare — a five-year time limit and work mandate — have never applied to subsidized housing.

According to HUD officials, the new rules are inspired by data that show how tenants who should move up from and out of public housing — namely, those who are neither elderly nor disabled — remain stuck once they begin receiving support. Some 87 percent of such tenants remain in their units, which are subsidized by vouchers covering 70 percent of the rent, for five years or more; 73 percent remain for ten years or more; and 60 percent remain for 15 years or more. As Alex Corrales, executive director of the Worcester Housing Authority in Massachusetts, tells me, “We’ve had up to fourth-generation residents living in public housing.” Roughly 5.51 million people live in 2.79 million voucher units. Many of them are employable adults.

Surprisingly, even as liberal housing-advocacy groups have sounded a false alarm about impending evictions from subsidized housing, 227 local public-housing authorities, non-profits, and tribal nations have signaled their willingness to implement the new time limit and work requirement rule by joining HUD’s Work and Dignity Coalition. The authorities distribute housing vouchers locally and will set specific terms for assistance under the new rule.

It’s a politically savvy way to counter the scare tactics of groups such as the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which has asserted that the “proposed rule would jeopardize housing assistance for millions of HUD tenants without addressing the root causes of affordability.” These groups often support turning rental assistance into an entitlement program — a goal that has never advanced in Congress. As a result, waiting lists for rental assistance average 27 months, even as tenants who receive subsidies face no time limit.

Those long waiting lists are a reason why many local housing authorities support the new rule. As Kelvin Jeremiah, who heads the Philadelphia Housing Authority, the fourth-largest in the nation, tells me: “We have a huge waiting list, and part of the objective is to absolutely reduce the dependency and the time that one stays.” That isn’t just true of big cities. Kimberly Townsend, executive director of the Housing Authority of Anderson, Ind., a city of 55,000, has heard of authorities whose waiting lists stretch to nine years, which she calls “ludicrous.” She hopes to clear hers in a year or less under the new rule.

Townsend is also committed to changing the mindset of tenants: “When you have a fully subsidized life, you don’t have the same view towards these benefits as someone who knows the value of them because they are now a taxpayer themselves, working a job.” An African American and a onetime housing voucher recipient herself, she is not shying away from working with a population that is 54 percent black. She envisions imposing a time limit and work mandate even on long-term tenants. “I tell them in briefings simply this: the day of the fully subsidized life is coming to an end. You must work, you must have income, you must get some type of training.”

In Worcester, Mass., a city of 213,000, Housing Authority director Alex Corrales joined the new coalition because of his experience with such rules. Under former Republican Governor Charlie Baker, Massachusetts adopted a work requirement for its small number of public-housing units that had originally been funded by the state rather than Washington. The state’s “better life” program also allowed tenants to pay a fixed rent even if their income increased. (Subsidized tenants paid 30 percent of their income toward rent.) The money they saved went into an interest-bearing escrow account, which they would withdraw after they left public housing. Even without a time limit, the experiment suggests that the HUD proposal holds promise.

“The difference it made,” Corrales says, was like “night and day.” While some were concerned that the new policy would increase eviction rates and, therefore, homelessness, tenants exited after six to eight years on average — in a system where the average tenancy had previously lasted 17 years. The Worcester Housing Authority has seen eight to ten beneficiaries a year become homeowners after using part of their escrow savings for a down payment. Moreover, in the past ten years, the tenants of only two households have been evicted for noncompliance.

“An eviction is a failure on our part,” Corrales says, although he does not shrink from using the threat of eviction as a deterrent. Like Kimberly Townsend in Indiana, Corrales hopes that the new HUD rule will encourage turnover, as is the case in the private housing market. He wants to see tenants “move out to be self-sufficient and not come back to public housing.”

Support for the new HUD rule appears to focus more on its potential work requirement than a strict time limit. “We have a generation of people who have never worked, who have never left the urban enclaves that they live in, and I find that problematic,” says Kelvin Jeremiah of Philadelphia. “I’ve done this work for more than 20 years, and no one has ever said to me, ‘Mr. Jeremiah, I want my son or daughter to be a public-housing resident and to never leave public housing.’”

Jeremiah, Townsend, and Corrales all believe that a one-size-fits-all time limit is impractical. Jeremiah delights, however, in telling the story of former resident LaToya, whom he personally encouraged to work despite there being no requirement that she do so. “She never had plans to get a job. All she knew was the public housing,” he says. LaToya began to work at the Philadelphia Housing Authority, then decided to become an aircraft mechanic. “She’s now working at the Houston International Airport. Her children are graduating from high school, going on to college. They want to have jobs.” It’s worth noting that the housing authority paid for LaToya’s job training.

Jeremiah believes that work requirements won’t be enough without guidance and support. Housing authorities, however, will have flexibility in how they implement the new HUD rule based on local housing conditions and the characteristics of their tenants. Supporters of the new rule do not see it as a way to reduce HUD spending. According to Corrales, public-housing tenants typically need guidance from caseworkers to venture successfully into the world of work. The barriers, he says, can be psychological — as illustrated by the story of a tenant who missed the bus on the way to a job interview. “She just didn’t go to the interview. Didn’t call or try to get there another way.”

The New York City Housing Authority, the largest in the nation, has not expressed support for the “up and out” goal. An NYCHA spokesperson told me that high rents and a low vacancy rate in the city are to blame. But the official citywide vacancy rate of 1.5 percent masks higher vacancy rates in many neighborhoods in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where rents are also relatively low. Moreover, nothing would preclude NYCHA from limiting the time limit and work requirement rule to new tenants, who make up just 6 percent of the nearly 500,000 tenants it houses each year. NYCHA does not seem completely opposed to the idea. As a spokesperson told me, “These rules are a HUD proposal, and HUD has not issued final rules to date. The proposal states that [public housing agencies] can opt in voluntarily.”

The proposed HUD rule may look like a small change; only a few hundred of the nation’s 3,200 public-housing authorities have expressed support. But small changes can have a big impact — as illustrated by 401(k)s, health savings accounts, and the first state charter school (in Minnesota), none of which was initially understood as a watershed development. Changing the rules and incentives for public and subsidized housing could change the psychology and culture of the programs so that they no longer foster long-term dependency. Quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, who initiated the housing voucher program, described long-term relief as a “subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” He argued instead that any job is better for an able-bodied person than public assistance. If that becomes a new norm for subsidized housing, Scott Turner will deserve the credit.