In The News - 6/20/2024
The Spokesman Review
Unable to find one itself, county to pay someone to locate new homeless shelter site
Pierce County is scrambling to find a location and service provider for a new stability site for the homeless before the funding is no longer available.
Pierce County’s 2024-2025 biennial budget appropriated $2.5 million from the COVID-19 American Rescue Plan Fund for establishing a low-barrier homeless stability site, but the federal ARPA dollars are only available through the end of 2024.
Pierce County Human Services has been working to find a location, but the department has reported complications. According to Human Services director Heather Moss, the county is pivoting to contract service providers to find a site, build the shelter and operate it.
The stability site, as stipulated by the Pierce County Council, must be low-barrier housing for those living outdoors in Pierce County, have hygiene services and infrastructure and be outside Tacoma.
The stability site was directed to be outside Tacoma because the city is home to the broad majority of homeless-shelter capacity in the county.
In April, Moss reported difficulties in finding a viable site.
After county staff examined surplus properties owned by the county, Moss told the County Council’s Select Committee on Homelessness that there were not many appropriate locations for a single stability site and that multiple sites might be necessary. Moss also said the county’s zoning code might prohibit a shelter that would exist longer than 90 days. Any permanent structures built on the site would also require permitting for safety purposes, according to county staff. That could slow down the process of activating the shelter.
Subsidies were meant to cap poor people’s rent payments at 30% of income. In Boise, they don’t
Forty years ago, Congress created a program to help people who were too poor to rent safe housing find places to live. The new federal housing vouchers would pay part of the rent for an apartment or house in the private market.
Today, more than 2,500 households in Ada County depend on vouchers. But many pour far more of their modest incomes into rent than Congress originally intended.
Congress in 1969 defined affordable housing as costing no more than 25% of a low-income household’s rent, according to a study of rent burdens by the Pew Charitable Trusts. In 1981, Congress boosted that to 30%. That’s been the recognized standard since. If your household earns $20,000 per year, no more than $6,000 of that should go toward rent, so you still have money for food and other living costs. If you pay more, you’re considered rent-burdened.
But the nation’s costliest program for helping low-income people, known as housing choice vouchers, has a little-known hole that can force tenants to pay far more than 30% of their incomes toward rent. According to the executive director of the local housing authorities serving Boise and Ada County, tenants sometimes pay twice that much or more.
Multiple federal programs continue to use the 30%-of-income standard to target low-income renters. For example, a tax credit that developers can take to help make the development of low-income apartments economically feasible requires gross rents not to exceed 30% of the income of renters, and those renters must earn no more than 60% of the local median income.
Consider someone earning $41,160 a year, which the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development says is 60% of the Boise area’s 2024 median income of $69,115 for a single person. That person should pay no more than $1,029 a month in rent. A household of four earning $58,800 (60% of the $98,700 HUD says is the area’s median income for a household that size) should pay no more than $1,470.