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“I would say that the 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. 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.
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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. 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. 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. “It really is the market forces in many ways diluting what we’re able to do.” “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. 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. Federal and local officials told CalMatters that signing bonuses and heftier security deposits are ways to overcome property owners’ wariness toward the program. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Sweetening the deal for landlords is critical to the strategy, according to the U.S. 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. The new set of vouchers released in May 2021 came with looser rules and more generous incentives to help persuade landlords to take them. These vouchers have helped pay rent for more than 300,000 households in California this year, totaling $1.9 billion in assistance.īut only one in four needy households get help, and the vouchers end up passing through multiple families’ hands before turning into a rent check because many landlords reject them. 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. 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.Ī 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. Section 8 vouchers have been one of the federal government’s landmark responses to unaffordable housing for half a century.