Report: Rent help falls short

BOISE – Needy families in North Idaho are waiting up to three years to get federal rental assistance, and a new report says various program changes that are being debated in the nation’s capital could make the situation much worse.

“With all the changes and growth happening in the West, losing funds for affordable housing construction and preservation could not come at a worse time,” said the report, released Monday by the Utah-based Rural Collaborative.

The Rural Collaborative is a nonprofit housing network in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, North Dakota, South Dakota and Utah. Its new report, “HOME on the Range: Why America’s rural West needs more housing support,” says rents are rising far faster than incomes in those states. It also suggests that proposed cutbacks in the federal Section 8 rent voucher program and restructuring in the federal HOME program could worsen the problem.

Lynn Peterson, executive director of St. Vincent de Paul in Coeur d’Alene, said her agency sees more and more needy people every year. St. Vincent’s operates 44 transitional housing units and two emergency shelters, and they’re “always full,” she said. “We never have vacancies. It is just grabbed right up.

“Every year it gets worse. It never seems to get better.”

St. Vincent’s has been seeing an average of 11 people a day in need of assistance ranging from emergency housing to clothing, food or help with utility bills.

There are success stories, Peterson noted. One woman who had been released from prison after serving time for a methamphetamine offense couldn’t find housing because landlords wouldn’t rent to her, even after she went through the agency’s transitional housing and life skills programs. But now she has a good job and is buying a house.

Another, a mother with three children, ended up in the program after her husband never told her he hadn’t been paying the rent – until the family was evicted. “She’s making it, too,” Peterson said.

But Peterson said local rents have skyrocketed in the past decade, along with the price of houses.

“This is a resort town, so we have a lot of low-wage earners, low-income people,” she said. “Unless they bought a house 10 or 15 years ago where they could manage those house payments, they’re in trouble.”

The new report says families throughout the West are paying too much for rental housing as a percentage of their income. Western communities also are more dependent on federal rental assistance programs than big metropolitan areas back east, which tend to have state or local assistance available as well.

Nevertheless, the report points to some bright spots, in which affordable housing is being developed in western communities where it’s badly needed.

The current debate in the nation’s capital over funding for housing programs included controversial administrative changes implemented by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in April that scaled back funding for Section 8 vouchers partway through the year. After an outcry, most of those cutbacks were reversed, but larger cuts were proposed for next year.

Congress hasn’t yet given final approval to budgets for HUD for next year.

The resulting uncertainty has many concerned that private landlords and developers may not want to participate in the federal programs, for fear the funding could disappear.

“There is some likelihood of continuing uncertainty … into ‘05. People are getting ulcers and gray hair,” said Barbara Sard, director of housing policy for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington, D.C., group that tracks the issue. “It’s a terrible situation to be in. We’re all at our wits’ end.”

The administration proposed turning the Section 8 voucher program into a block grant to states in 2005, changing many of its rules and sharply reducing its fast-growing budget while seeking efficiencies. However, versions of the HUD budget passed by both the House and Senate thus far haven’t included that restructuring.

The Rural Collaborative’s report calls for increasing federal housing aid, rather than cutting it.

“Western nonprofit housing developers have constructed a successful track record of providing rental and home ownership opportunities for western working families,” the report said. “As federal budgets for social services shrink, prudent leaders will see that housing is social infrastructure – essential for community prosperity, and an investment well spent.”

According to the Idaho Housing and Finance Association, Idaho has more than 6,500 rent vouchers to tenants being administered under Section 8, but more than 7,200 more applicants on waiting lists.