COVID program may ease crisis
Officials say new features offer some promising solutions
Section 8 vouchers have been one of the federal government’s landmark responses to unaffordable housing for half a century. But too often in California, families sit on a waitlist for years, only to see their once-golden ticket expire before they can find a home.
A fresh batch of emergency vouchers became available last year to address growing housing insecurity during the deadly COVID-19 pandemic — and local and federal officials watching their rollout believe the new vouchers’ features already offer some promising solutions to a broken system.
Housing choice vouchers, added in 1974 to Section 8 of the federal Housing Act of 1937, allow low-income tenants to pay only 30% of their income toward rent and utilities while Uncle Sam shoulders the rest. These vouchers have helped pay rent for more than 300,000 households in California this year, totaling $1.9 billion in assistance.
But only 1 in 4 needy households gets help, and the vouchers end up passing through multiple families’ hands before turning into a rent check because many landlords reject them.
The new set of vouchers released in May 2021 came with looser rules and more generous incentives to help persuade landlords to take them. Instead of any low-income household, these vouchers target people who are homeless, at risk of homelessness or fleeing domestic violence — typically considered the most challenging groups to house.
Sweetening the deal for landlords is critical to the strategy, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Federal and local officials
told CalMatters that signing bonuses and heftier security deposits are ways to overcome property owners’ wariness toward the program.
Yet in some of the state’s tightest rental markets, such as Los Angeles, landlord reluctance still remains a crucial hurdle, despite recent state laws intended to make finding an apartment easier for voucher recipients.
“The reality is that landlords have so many choices right now on the open market,” said Chris Contreras, chief program officer for Brilliant Corners, a San Francisco-based nonprofit housing services provider that helps voucher holders find apartments. “It really is the market forces in many ways diluting what we’re able to do.”
In just more than a year, California has used about a third of the 17,000 new vouchers it received from the feds, worth more than $400 million. Smaller cities, including Redding and San Luis Obispo, turned nearly all of their vouchers into leases — while other cities, including Los Angeles, still have more than 3,000 families waiting to find a home.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development says under the emergency voucher program, it’s taking an average of 75 days to sign a lease in California and 70 days nationwide. Although HUD officials were unable to provide a comparable timeline for the traditional Section 8 program, making it difficult to evaluate the emergency voucher program more broadly, they like what they see.
“I would say that the
Housing choice vouchers have helped pay rent for more than 300,000 households in California this year, totaling $1.9billion in assistance.
emergency housing vouchers, in some ways, came with some of the features that we would like to see reflected in all of our voucher programs,” said Richard Cho, a senior adviser with HUD.
Bonuses for landlords
What sets the new vouchers apart is the additional $3,500 per voucher received by public housing authorities, which they can pool together and spend on landlord bonuses, tenant preparedness, housing search help and other services.
Of the $11.6 million spent by California housing agencies on services so far, $2.7 million went to landlord bonuses, $2.5 million to housing search assistance and $3.3 million to security deposits, application fees and other costs.
In data reported to HUD so far, California is spending a greater share of its extra dollars cajoling landlords than the nationwide average. The state received nearly a quarter of the country’s allotment of emergency vouchers, and so far accounts for 45% of the money spent on landlord incentives.
It’s unclear yet whether
any one form of assistance worked better than another, especially in tight rental markets. However, the additional resources were key to getting people into apartments in 12 housing authorities across the country, including San Francisco and Santa Barbara, surveyed by the Urban Institute for a forthcoming study. But discrimination and lack of available units remain key barriers, the study found.
“Landlord incentives are really what’s enabling access to the private market with these vouchers,” said Samantha Batko, an Urban Institute researcher who led the study.
`Up against a wall'
Despite the promise of signing bonuses and other incentives, many landlords remain unswayed. And some of California’s largest housing authorities are taking longer than the rest of the state to house their emergency voucher recipients.
Nowhere is the challenge more acute than in Los Angeles, whose city housing authority received more than 3,300 emergency vouchers, the biggest grant in the state and second only to New York
City in the nation.
As of this month, only 207 of those vouchers were in use — 6% of the vouchers given to the agency, according to HUD data. Thousands of other recipients are still searching for a unit. In a late July statement, the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles said updated numbers show the city has leased 325 units.
Local housing authorities and advocates blame intense competition for a slim supply of low-rent units — among tenants not receiving aid, thousands of traditional Section 8 voucher holders and now the thousands of new emergency voucher recipients receiving aid from the city housing agency, the county housing authority and smaller housing authorities across Los Angelese County.
“We’re coming up against a wall of available units at our price point,” said Carlos VanNatter, director of Section 8 for the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles.
Los Angeles’ rental vacancy rate was just more than 4% in June, according to RentCafe. For emergency voucher holders and other local homeless placement programs, VanNatter’s agency offers landlords $2,500 for each recipient that moves into a unit, plus funding to repair a unit in advance of a HUD inspection, VanNatter said. In addition, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority can provide a security deposit of as much as twice the monthly rent.
Daniel Yukelson, executive director of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, said many property owners “don’t want to touch” any voucher programs, particularly those run by the larger housing authorities.
Landlords continue to hold suspicions about tenants who hold vouchers, driven by anecdotes from fellow property owners, he said. With plenty of potential tenants, they don’t want to wade through the paperwork of the voucher program. And they’re unwilling to wait, Yukelson said, for a housing authority to conduct an inspection — sometimes losing a month or two of rent — before a tenant moves in.
“There’s just not enough money put on the table for people to jump for it,” Yukelson said. “If I had a vacant unit and had 20 people show up — there’s a bunch of people begging to rent my apartment — why deal with all the administrative burdens?”
VanNatter said it’s difficult to tell just how effective the incentives will be, but he’s wary of overusing them.
“Landlords are smart, they’re trying to optimize dollars,” he said. “Would it help if we provide more money in these incentives? But it almost seems like we’re just throwing this money out there.”