Vouchers, already too small to help most low-income residents find housing, are about to get smaller
Vouchers, already too small to help most low-income residents find housing, are about to get smaller
Despite skyrocketing property values and an acute shortage of rental units in Transylvania County, the federal government reduces aid to help families pay their rent.
Federal Housing Choice Vouchers are meant to cover fair-market rent. In Transylvania County, voucher amounts are so limited they cannot pay the lower rents at complexes, such as Broad River Terrace Apartments (above) built with the help of federal tax credits.
By Dan DeWitt
Brevard NewsBeat
BREVARD — The federal government says its Housing Choice Vouchers should cover the cost of “privately owned, decent, safe and sanitary rental housing.”
In Transylvania County they don’t even come close, said Sheryl Fortune, who administers the local voucher program as housing director of Western Carolina Community Action.
A 2020 housing study commissioned by the city of Asheville found the median market-rate rental for a one-bedroom apartment in Transylvania to be the highest in the four-county area — $1,200.
The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development currently approves $570 monthly to cover the “fair-market rent” of a one-bedroom unit in Transylvania. And after denying WCCA’s formal appeal — and despite skyrocketing property values — HUD recently told Fortune that, starting April 1, the amount paid by these vouchers will drop to $536.
“Something is all wrong,” she said.
The clearest proof of this is in HUD’s own numbers, which show that in the past six months only 17 percent of the recipients of these supplements — also known as “Section 8 vouchers’’ — have been able to use them to pay for rental units.
With few recipients finding housing, more prospective tenants re-apply to the WCCA’s voucher waiting list, which now includes nearly 200 names. Residents who have watched the four-month term for their vouchers expire and, faced with the prospect of moving from the county or staying indefinitely in inadequate dwellings, have little choice but to get back in line.
“I’ve had more than one family go through the process two or three times,” said Sonya Flynn, WCCA’s senior housing specialist.
Squeezing in
Diana Valencia, a 48-year-old school cafeteria worker, may end up being one of them. She was issued a voucher in the fall for a three-bedroom apartment for her and her two teenage children. She is trying to decide whether to reapply after this first voucher expired in January.
“There were places that were small little three-bedroom apartments and they wanted $1,250 for them,” said Valencia, whose living situation is typical of unsuccessful voucher recipients.
Some mark time in homeless shelters, or in campers or other makeshift dwellings, Flynn said. Most squeeze in with friends and family. Valencia and her children divide time living with family members in Brevard and Georgia.
“I mean I saw one (apartment) for $1,850, and I don't understand who in Brevard could afford that rent unless it was a two-income family.”
The shortage
Though HUD’s formula for setting the voucher amount is complicated, Fortune said, the crux of the problem is this: The department classifies Transylvania as a rural county even though its housing prices are in line with those of more urban communities.
Housing choice vouchers are intended to pay for market-rate housing, but they can be used in “income-targeted” apartment complexes built with the help of federal tax credits, Fortune said.
In Transylvania, though, the subsidies can’t even pay these much-lower rents, especially because they must also cover the cost of utilities. At one such subsidized complex, Broad River Terrace in Brevard, a typical one-bedroom unit costs $605 per month — or, with utilities, an estimated $675, Fortune said. That’s $139 more than the new voucher amount.
Also, each of these developments maintains a long waiting list for prospective tenants — a circumstance caused by the acute shortage of multifamily housing highlighted by Asheville’s report, which was compiled by Bowen National Research.
Of the 700 market-rate and subsidized units Bowen surveyed in Transylvania, it found precisely one open unit, for a vacancy rate of about .1 percent, compared to 2.1 percent in Henderson County and 3.5 percent in Buncombe County.
Voucher recipients do not receive the entire amount of the supplement, but must contribute to 30 percent of their income. This is the percentage that HUD defines as the upper limit of affordability, and, with this constraint in mind, the agency allows voucher holders to contribute only 10 additional percent of their income to fill the gap between voucher amounts and the cost of rent and utilities.
In the rare cases that these sums are enough to make the lease deals work, it comes from a population that usually cannot afford to pay extra.
To qualify for vouchers, recipients must earn less than half of the county’s median income, and “many of them have an income in the range of $800 to $900 a month,” Fortune said.
Though all recipients are called “families” by HUD, about three-fourths of the assisted families in Transylvania County are elderly or disabled individuals, she said, and most of the rest are families headed by single parents.
The unsuccessful appeal
HUD announced the lower rates for Transylvania County in late summer, Fortune said. With money WCCA received from a previous Covid-19 federal relief bill, she was able to formally challenge the voucher amount.
“It’s such an onerous process we have to hire a consultant,” she said. But after her agency paid nearly $27,000 for this appeal, she found that the process, like the voucher system itself, fails to account for the circumstances of individual counties.
It requires responses from at least 100 renters who have moved within the past two years, or the same number that would be required of, for example, New York City, she said. The appeal process also excludes responses from people who live in subsidized units, units rented from relatives and seasonal units.
The survey criteria therefore left a tiny pool of potential respondents, and a major obstacle for the consulting firm to mount a successful appeal. It was able to gather only 13 valid responses, a number cited in an email from HUD last month that forecast the rejection of WCCA’s challenge.
“You have requested a revised . . . FMR (Fair Market Rent) based on only 13 survey results, but as noted in the letter accepting your request for reevaluation, 100 survey results are required,” wrote Marie Lihn, a HUD senior economist.
Joe Phillips, spokesman for HUD’s regional office in Atlanta, said the department is is “aware of the unique challenges that face smaller jurisdictions in conducting surveys.” He recommended that WCCA work together on a future challenge with similar organizations serving similar-sized communities.
That would be difficult, Fortune said, because Transylvania’s housing market is so unusual and HUD requires that any partners in such appeals serve adjacent communities, none of which face the severe obstacles with voucher amounts that Transylvania does.
But she does think she can find allies by casting a wider net. She has reached out to through her nationwide professional organization to connect with other housing officials facing the same issues. She hopes to join with them to make another, more public appeal.
“I am in communication with them trying to raise this issue on HUD’s radar,” she said. “I’m trying to get some light shined on this problem.”