Why this matters
The end of a COVID-19 federal housing assistance program could leave thousands of people on city streets come fall.
After months of uncertainty, Los Angeles housing officials last week saved 4,200 people who were formerly unhoused or at risk of it from losing rental assistance by transferring them to Section 8 housing
The end of an emergency pandemic-era program leaves San Diego with the same problem.
Its housing officials don’t have a solution yet.
In San Diego, federal funding for the program is set to run out this fall, several years ahead of schedule, leaving over 300 vulnerable renters on their own within the city of San Diego.
The city’s U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development funding was insufficient to transfer people into Section 8, spokesperson Scott Marshall said in a statement.
Marshall said that HUD may still provide an additional month of funding later this year.
The Emergency Housing Voucher program pays out $1.4 million in monthly housing assistance in San Diego County to some of the region’s most vulnerable formerly unhoused renters. The San Diego Housing Commission gets nearly $1 million. The rest goes to agencies representing National City, Oceanside and San Diego County.
Nationally 44,000 households benefit from the $5 billion dollar program. It was designed to be funded until 2030, but in some places like San Diego, rising costs of living have caused the money to run out early.
Ryan Finnigan, the deputy director of research at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley who has studied the program nationally, is “cautiously optimistic” that many if not most people with emergency housing vouchers “will have continued support through other sources.”
Finnigan said places like Los Angeles have moved people to Section 8 housing, and other places are using Tenant Protection Voucher funding, which helps protect families in federal housing programs from displacement.
The County of Los Angeles Housing Authority’s additional funds covered the $22 million emergency housing voucher transition and gave them a $40 million reserve. The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles sent out notices in January that the program would run out of money. It was saved by a $138 million increase in Section 8 funding from HUD this year that will allow it to cover the $50 million cost of the vouchers in the city of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Times reported last Thursday.
The L.A. housing authority is processing 3,000 applicants for section 8 with the new funding.
The same federal appropriation reached both Los Angeles and San Diego in February.
Los Angeles used its share to save every emergency-voucher household and move people off of a waitlist. San Diego was left with a budget hole.
One reason is a funding formula quirk: HUD uses different funding formulas to calculate funding for these cities. San Diego is a Moving to Work Authority, which means they have more flexibility in how they use federal funding, while L.A. is a traditional housing authority.
That left the San Diego Housing Commission with few options but to raise rents on the elderly, disabled and working-poor tenants in Section 8 to keep from cutting 1,700 of them off of assistance entirely.
But there is still no easy way for San Diego’s financially strapped housing authority to transition the remaining Emergency Housing Voucher holders.
Over 300 households remain in the program while 105 have been transitioned out to project-based vouchers, which require people to live in a specific complex.
HUD rejected requests to waive requirements that would have allowed additional families to transition to programs requiring them to be designated as unhoused in order to qualify.
Marshall said that once federal funding concludes the city housing authority “will not be able to continue to help EHV families pay for their housing.”
County housing officials face a similar budget shortfall that could leave people with emergency housing vouchers without a home. The county exhausted its Section 8 reserve funds to transition 50 households earlier this year, leaving 138 searching for another option.
inewsource asked them about the situation last Friday, and they hadn’t responded by Thursday night.
The city and the county closed their section 8 waitlists recently, in part because they haven’t pulled anyone from the list in years. The city’s waitlist currently has 76,000 people on it and the county’s has 124,000, a sign of how expensive housing is locally and how many people need help.
