Housing need trumps supply

By The Daily Progress

Published: September 14, 2008

Three hundred opportunities to get help with housing.

Fifteen hundred people seeking that help.

That’s a snapshot of Charlottesville’s low-income housing needs — and it’s a frightening one.
Here’s another quick picture: For five years, the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority closed its waiting list for one of its assistance programs — five years — because no help was available.

It’s that waiting list that is in the news again today.
City housing officials plan to reopen the list for people who seek Section 8 vouchers, which offer help with rent payments. The subsidies can be applies to approved, privately owned apartments and rental houses. Even though the properties must offer relatively low rents to be approved for the program, many people still can’t afford them.
The backlist for this assistance had been closed to new applicants because there was simply no more help available.

“It was just unfair to keep it open,” said Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris. Putting new names on the list only would have given those people false hope.
It’s taken five years to work through the waiting list.
Now the housing authority is back to a roughly neutral position.
People on the waiting list in 2003 have obtained Section 8 housing, found other options or given up and moved on.
Through a federal program, the city is able to offer 300 vouchers a year.

Right now, those vouchers are taken by existing clients. But officials plan to reopen the waiting list so that — as current clients move — people with housing needs can be considered for those openings.
Officials expect 1,500 people to sign up — 1,500 people who need housing help, who know they can’t be helped at present, but who are so deeply in need that they are willing to gamble on a chance for help sometime in the future.
In a sense, the return of the waiting list couldn’t come at a better time, as the current economic crisis has increased demand for affordable housing. At least people can get on the list for possible future help.

But the magnitude of the demand and the availability of supply are so unbalanced that, in another sense, the waiting list may do little more than re-emphasize an impossible situation.
Fifteen hundred people willing to sign up just for the chance — the mere hope — of housing help?

That’s a snapshot of deep hardship.