An informational meeting on the rent buy-down program for landlords will be held at 2 p.m. Tuesday at the Vancouver Housing Authority, 2500 Main St. All potential landlord applicants are strongly encouraged to come learn the details of the program.
Learn more at www.vhausa.com/about/news_about_vha.html
The Vancouver Housing Authority has rolled out initiatives aimed at opening the very tight private apartment market for some very low-income tenants.
One new program offers subsidies for reduced rents at market-rate apartment buildings. A second program creates a new housing voucher wait list that favors fast action for homeless families with children in school and people with major medical problems.
VHA commissioners recently approved spending $180,000 annually for the rent buy-down program, aimed at new or existing apartment buildings with at least 25 units. To participate, landlords must agree to designate for the new subsidy program at least 10 percent of the units in a building that has 25 to 50 units and at least five units in developments with more than 50 units.
The rent subsidies are open to households earning no more than 50 percent of the area median, currently set by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development at $36,750 for a family of four. VHA wants to see such families paying no more than 33 percent of their income on rent, according to VHA federal programs manager David Overbay.
An example provided by VHA: If a landlord is asking $900 for a two-bedroom unit, the tenant would pay approximately $729 in rent and the VHA would provide a rent subsidy to the landlord of $171.
The program should be simpler and more stable for landlords to deal with than the existing federal Section 8 voucher program, which can be labor-intensive and inconvenient, Overbay said. VHA wants to contract with landlords for at least two years at a time, with extensions available.
VHA executive director Roy Johnson said he’s eager to hear from the owners of new market-rate apartment developments in Vancouver who want to offer groups of units for the program.
“I’m hoping to catch some of the new ones that are coming up out of the ground now,” he said. “New developments who are preparing for their lease-ups … could rent a whole block of units pretty easily this way.”
There’s another reason, besides convenience and stability, why landlords might be interested in this opportunity, according to VHA voucher program director Sasha Nichelson: conscience.
“Extraordinarily high rents and low vacancy rates” are what apartment hunters are facing these days, Nichelson said. “We really would like it if landlords would consider their community obligation to assist in serving some of those people who are really needy.”
Renters with government vouchers don’t have “a great reputation, but we want to change that,” she said. “There are a lot of fine people in our voucher program.”
Costliest people
VHA’s other new initiative is its change in wait list preferences to focus its efforts on big-picture priorities.
“If a lack of housing causes other problems, those have a cost to the community,” Overbay said. “There are people whose lack of housing ends up costing a lot. The idea is, how can we use housing to get the most bang for our buck?”
The housing agency hired the regional nonprofit Healthy Living Collaborative to survey VHA tenants and local social service agencies. The costliest people to the community in general, the collaborative determined, are homeless families with children in school and poor people with complex, chronic medical problems. Providing them stable housing means helping to stabilize education for the children, health for the grown-ups and life in general for everyone, Nichelson said. And that will bring down all sorts of costs.
So VHA decided to retool its voucher wait list in order to prioritize those people. The new wait list will take referrals only from school district homeless liaisons and from local health care organizations that work with the Washington State Health Care Authority’s Health Home Program. That’s a program providing coordinated care for high-cost, high-risk, low-income clients in order to reduce chronic disease, as well as inappropriate emergency room visits and hospital stays, while improving self-care and self-management.
The new voucher wait list also means that VHA will phase out the old one.
The main VHA wait list for what are called Housing Choice Vouchers has been closed since 2006, and there are still hundreds of names on it. Only about 200 vouchers get freed up per year, according to Overbay.
“It’s housing by attrition,” he said. “It’s gotten to the point where getting a Housing Choice Voucher is like winning the lottery.” Those who do get vouchers are people who fit VHA’s current wait list preferences — elderly, disabled, families with children. Those people will still get vouchers before the old list phases out.
But people who don’t fit into those groups will just drop off the list. Which really isn’t much different than before, Overbay said, since they had little chance of rising to the top anyway. (VHA recently launched a different voucher wait list aimed at matching up roommates of a sort it rarely houses: able-bodied single people. Just 20 of those vouchers are available.
