[caption id="attachment_1687" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Jennifer Cherry stands in the doorway of her home, holding the cancellation letter from the housing authority. Photo by Ken Hawkins"]
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It arrived late May to nearly 300 Section 8 recipients in Northwest Oregon, giving them 30 days to avoid becoming homeless
By Joanne Zuhl
Staff Writer
This summer, unlike the past, held promise for Jennifer Cherry.
After two years on a waiting list, Jennifer and her family finally received their Section 8 voucher and in February found a home. For her and her fiancé, Jeff Crist, and their three children, it meant they could move out of her mother’s house, put her children in good schools in Garibaldi, and concentrate on recovering physically and finding jobs. They each suffered disabilities that left them without work — Jennifer has a herniated disc in her neck and Jeff is recovering from a collision with a logging truck two years ago. But he had recently received his certificate as a flagger and was looking to get on a crew this summer. Next month, Jennifer will go in for surgery to correct her neck.
Yes, there was a lot of potential in the air, right up to the moment Jennifer opened the letter from the housing authority at the start of June.
“Our funding has been reduced significantly effective June 1, 2009 through Dec. 31, 2009. Our only option at this time is to terminate rental assistance for a minimum of 230 program participants…. We apologize for the inconvenience this will cause your family…”
The “inconvenience” poses an insurmountable financial barrier to her family. Jennifer and her fiancé’s combined income is $700 a month through disability assistance. Their rent is $984, of which NOHA paid about 90 percent.
“It has taken so long to get where we’re at, and then to just be pushed out,” Jennifer says, in between silence and tears. “It’s taken us two years to get this far, and in one month we’re supposed to be homeless again?”
[caption id="attachment_1688" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="285 households received letters like this from the Northwest Oregon Housing Authority, notifying them that the rental assistance they've been authorized will by cancelled July 1. Photo by Ken Hawkins"]
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A total of 285 letters were sent out to Section 8 recipients like Jennifer in Columbia, Clatsop and Tillamook counties, all managed by the Northwest Oregon Housing Authority, or NOHA. That’s equal to the entire population of Manzanita, or other rural towns that pepper that region of the state — roughly 25 percent of NOHA’s Section 8 participants. It comes as a devastating blow to renters who are among the disabled, elderly and poor, and it has many people who work with the vulnerable in the region scratching their heads at to how such a catastrophic failure of bureaucracy could occur seemingly without warning.
For a would-be tenant, securing Section 8 housing assistance means navigating an obstacle course of waiting lists, paperwork requirements, landlord discrimination rights, affordability, and economic flux. All of which were in play in the months leading up to the termination letters from NOHA.
Like all housing authorities, NOHA distributes Section 8 rental assistance based on the funding support provided by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. NOHA is approved to support 1,077 housing units across Clatsop, Columbia and Tillamook counties, and funding for those units is determined by HUD according to a formula based on the housing authority’s previous year’s success at meeting 100 percent of the unit goal.
In mid-2008, NOHA realized it was under-leasing, falling short at 96 percent, according to HUD. It needed to fill more units. So it did, going beyond its federally allotted 1,077.
But, despite the financial assistance, people couldn’t find affordable places to rent. To even use their Section 8 vouchers, renters needed more financial aid. So at the start of 2009, NOHA raised its payment rates to landlords, all the while continuing to exceed its 1,077 allotted units.
It also started dipping into its reserves to pay the higher rates – reserves that had exceeded $1 million, according to HUD, accrued from money not spent from its Section 8 voucher budget. (However, reserves, by law, cannot be spent on new vouchers beyond the housing authority’s limit.)
By March, NOHA was expecting its funding notice from HUD for budgeting. It didn’t arrive until May. Still, NOHA is receiving more HUD housing assistance money than it had last year — $300,000 for a total of $5.33 million.
And by May, NOHA was over-leased, exceeding its voucher limit, and paying more in rents.
At the same time, people were not leaving the program at the normal attrition rate. Typically, about 15 people per month leave the Section 8 program, but because of the economy and the rise in unemployment, more people were staying on the program. Only about four or five were leaving each month, according to NOHA.
Columbia County’s unemployment rate is 15.4 percent, more than double what it was one year ago. The self-employed, such as builders and carpenters, make up a large portion of the region’s work force, and those jobs have slowed, stifling income if not generating unemployment figures. The bulk of remaining work is in lower-wage service jobs.
“People aren’t moving,” says Teresa Sims, second in command at NOHA. Sims runs the tenant-based assistance programs in conjunction with other agencies. “They’re not earning the income to actually move off the program by earning a living wage. They’re hanging onto the program as long as possible.”
(Carol Snell, NOHA’s executive director, was not available to return Street Roots’ calls.)
When the funding from HUD finally was determined, it was $600,000 short of the obligations already assumed by NOHA — a conclusion weighted heavily on the majority of the year when NOHA was under-leased.
And soon thereafter, Jennifer, and hundreds of other people like her, received their letters.
“HUD is looking at us, saying, ‘you should have all the money in your net asset reserve,’” Sims said. “And by May we had already spent that on the higher rent standard.”
“For a housing authority like NOHA, it is basically a forecasting issue,” said Lee Jones, a spokesman for HUD’s Northwest region, based in Seattle. “It’s a life of forecasting; over and under.”
When HUD looked at NOHA’s books, NOHA was still under-leased. By HUD’s assessment, NOHA hadn’t “earned” $600,000 in vouchers, as Jones’ puts it.
“What unfortunately happened in this incidence, when all is said and done, is NOHA didn’t hit right on its forecast; on leasing patterns, when and where it was leasing, when and where it was putting families on to the program,” Jones said.
Essentially, he said, over-leasing, timing and the economy dug them a hole. “The die was cast,” he said. “It was a perfect storm.”
State Sen. Betsy Johnson, who represents Northwest Oregon, doesn’t give a damn about the appropriate metaphor.
“At the end of the day, she says, “families are out in the streets because of somebody’s bureaucratic error.”
This isn’t the first time this has happened to NOHA. In 2004, the housing authority found itself in a similar shortfall - although with about a third the number of terminations. At that time, the state rustled up funding to bridge the gap, with Oregon Housing and Community Services, the umbrella agency for housing and homeless programs in Oregon, kicking in about $38,000 to help 23 families. This year, the state is dealing with its own billion-dollar deficit, but Oregon Housing and Community Services says it has earmarked $50,000 in discretionary resources to stabilize housing for the most vulnerable families. In a letter to Johnson, OHCS Deputy Director Rick Crager says that, “the management of NOHA remains a concern to OHCS.”
“Right now I don’t see a clear path to a complete safety net,” says Johnson, who is in discussions with local, state and federal lawmakers to address the situation. “I don’t want to extinguish hope, but I don’t see an easy path to an immediate solution. The bottom line for me is I want to find out how this happened, where the vulnerabilities are in this system, and why it is that the burden of whatever occurred rests on the back of these displaced families. We owe them better than this.”
Given a 30-day notice, people who received the letters began calling agencies and knocking on doors. The Community Action Team is the umbrella organization on housing and homeless services for sub-agencies in the tri-county region. Workers at CAT, which is based in St. Helens in Colombia County, and its partner organizations, are now networking locally and statewide for a solution to the crisis.
“People are coming to our doors but we don’t have the funding to help,” says George Sabol, the executive director of Clatsop County Community Action Team. New faces are arriving now, Sabol said; people who have never been in such a situation of need. Clatsop County had more than 100 tenants receive termination letters from NOHA. Sabol calls the situation a disaster, as much as if a flood or hurricane had come through and taken the homes of more than 300 men, women and children. As such, he’s looking at any and all emergency plans.
“One of the things we’re looking at doing is possibly renting a gymnasium like they do for disasters,” Sabol said. “People are saying it’s not a disaster but come July, it will be.”
The fact that the crisis comes at the end of many agencies fiscal year aggravates their ability to pick up the slack. “The trouble is it’s the end of our fiscal year,” said Rocky Johnson, the executive director of CAT. “We don’t have funds left.”
Some aid could be on its way through HUD’s Housing Prevention/Rapid Rehousing stimulus program, Johnson said. But that’s not expected until September at the earliest.
Other housing authorities across Oregon, notably Polk, Klamath and Yamhill counties, are feeling the pinch and have sent out some termination notices, but no where near the numbers in NOHA’s district, Jones says.
In the state of Washington, the Walla Walla Housing Authority also had its voucher funding reduced from HUD and has recently announced that it is considering cutting as many as 150 families and individual recipients from the program, possibly through a lottery system. The authority provides monthly rental assistance to more than 700 eligible families in Walla Walla County.
“This is not the only housing authority in the state of Oregon or in the country that is facing a problem of this time,” Jones said. “Unfortunately, the magnitude of the problem at this housing authority is significantly higher.”
Families who lose their housing as a result of the Section 8 termination face perils beyond homelessness. The loss of housing may be breaking a contract with a landlord that can affect a person’s rental record and credit report, jeopardizing future rental opportunities, says Jim Tierney with CAT in St. Helens. It also can sour landlords on Section 8 tenants altogether, and Oregon allows landlords to refuse leasing to Section 8 tenants. The instability of not having a home can also jeopardize employment or a person’s ability to get a job. There also are adverse, long-term effects on children in families that have to leave their home, live in uninhabitable situations or have to leave school districts - if not school - altogether, Tierney says.
Dona Bolt, Oregon Department Of Education Homeless Education Coordinator, reports that in school year 2007-08 the school districts in Clatsop, Columbia and Tillamook counties had 540 homeless students, of whom 460 were in families.
“From our point of view, this is also a crisis of wasted investment,” Tierney says. “Because if we’re going backward, for a year or little more than year, essentially is an awful lot of investment of our staff getting people off the streets and into housing. The money and time used is now potentially getting washed away.”
“The struggle to get people out of homelessness is a difficult one, and there are real barriers no matter how hard we work to get them out of the situation,” Tierney says. “We lose ground on all of those. And if we find some way to fix this problem, it uses up resources that would have gone to serve the next in line. It backs everything up.”
Jeff and Jennifer’s income is $700 a month. Their rent is nearly $1,000, but they have a home because they receive $884 in rent assistance through the Section 8 voucher program. It’s a shortfall their landlord Maureen Taylor, while sympathetic to their plight, cannot afford to cover.
“I can’t pick up $884 in rent,” Taylor said. She had intended to sell the home Jennifer and her family now live in, but as the economy soured, so did the buyers. The house sat empty for a year in a stagnant market. And there is little relief to be seen in Tillamook County’s forecast. On June 6, Hampton Lumber Mills completed a mass layoff of 85 employees.
“That’s the second group of layoffs they did and that’s like a major employer here. Go down to the unemployment office right now and go online and look for jobs: It’s all $9 and $10-an-hour jobs. There are no livable-wage jobs. There re four jobs open at the cheese factory. That’s it.”
Mike Cook with NeahCasa, a nonprofit based in Manzanita that works to secure affordable and emergency housing for people in need, said landlords have been meeting to discuss what they can do to salvage the situation. Cook works with NeahCasa’s student program, supporting homeless coordinators in each of the schools. In the Neah-Kah-Nie School District of about 700 students, about half qualify as living in poverty, and about 50 are classified as homeless, Cook says.
“When things are fragile anyway, and then we get bad economy and then we’re hit by something like this,” Cook says. “It’s just a slap in the face.”
Cook said the landlords are sensitive to the needs of the people, “but it is a lot to ask them to have to pay 75 percent of the rent. Or only receive 25 percent of the rent for their units. They’ve offered suggestions like doubling up, bringing in renters. The problem is there hasn’t been a forum to create a solution for this. This is a government program. There are people who are really hurting and we can’t forget about them.
“I think there needs to be a wave of concern here,” Cook says. “I think armed with some community outrage, our congressional representatives need to be alerted to the situation and need to do something about it. This is their stimulus package, but they’re the ones who put this whole thing together. You can’t blame it on some housing little housing authority in Oregon.”
NOHA, Sims said, is doing it all it can to alleviate the pain of the situation. When funding is available, the terminated recipients will be brought back on Section 8 immediately and will not have to go back to the waiting list, which currently has an 18-month to two-year wait.
And the vouchers are transferable to housing authorities in the state that can absorb them financially. Sims says the Coos-Curry, North Bend and the Malheur housing authorities have said they can absorb some of the vouchers. Some people already have said they were going to move, according to Sims. Others have said they will be doubling up in other people’s homes or apartments. (Occupancy standards set by HUD don’t apply if the people are not receiving paid assistance.)
Jennifer said she and her family moved to Garibaldi because of the quality of the education and that moving back in with her mother would mean a return to schools where her boys struggled and a house inadequate for the family. She considers living in a tent or a camper somewhere, or worse.
Sims says they also are working with state and federal representatives to correct the $600,000 shortfall.
“We here at NOHA are doing the best that we can do help as many as we can that are in need. It’s unfortunate that this did have to happen and we’re doing everything we can to mitigate what has happened by working with HUD and working with community partners to put people back on as soon as we possibly can.”
But it didn’t have to happen, according to Michael Anderson, executive director of the Oregon Opportunity Network, an affordable-housing advocacy organization.
“This whole crisis underscores how broken the funding system is that provides housing opportunities for the lowest income,” Anderson says. “We have a system that at the time when we need it most, is exposed for its weaknesses. A major challenge of the Obama administration is going to be getting our housing programs right, because they haven’t been for 30 years.”
Posted by Joanne Zuhl
