Charlotte got 178 emergency vouchers for homeless residents. Only 3 are in use.
Among the tens of millions of federal pandemic relief dollars that flowed into the Charlotte area, $2 million awarded last spring targeted one of its most dire needs: safe, affordable housing.
It funded 178 emergency vouchers to house some of the community’s most vulnerable residents — those who are homeless or at risk of it, including veterans, people who have experienced domestic violence, sexual assault or other trauma.
But nearly a year later, a tiny fraction of those vouchers are in use.
Federal data show only three housing units in Charlotte are currently leased using one of those vouchers, just under 2% of the local allocation.
That figure puts Charlotte near the bottom of the list of major metros that have used the vouchers to get people housed. Cities like Chicago, San Francisco, Houston and Washington, D.C. all have much higher rates. Statewide, housing organizations have used about 11% of the vouchers they were given.
The 178 awarded to Inlivian, Charlotte’s housing authority, are part of a $5 billion investment that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced last spring. It distributed nearly 70,000 vouchers to public housing authorities across the country in response to a housing crisis exacerbated by COVID-19.
The department’s announcement last year was hailed as a significant tool to house more homeless Americans. Federal voucher allocations have remained flat for decades, including in Charlotte, even as the country’s population grew and rents continue to rise.
But actually using them has been nearly impossible, said Kenny Robinson, president of Freedom Fighting Missionaries, a Charlotte nonprofit working with formerly incarcerated people.
“People are without a home ... They’ve already been approved with the voucher armed in their hands,” Robinson said.
“We are getting annihilated out here,” he said of the struggle to get people housed.
Jasmine Ingram, though, is now one step closer. The 22-year-old single mom was recently approved to rent a house off of South Tryon Street for her and her 1-year-old son, Kyrtier.
She said her criminal record, including a 2019 felony robbery conviction, was a huge obstacle to housing.
She applied for the emergency voucher in July and has been searching for places to use it since receiving it four months ago. While waiting, she bounced between hotels, apartments and family.
Even with the help of a nonprofit housing service, she watched potential homes slip by when landlords chose other applicants. Others became out of reach as rents across the city rose, exceeding the roughly $1,100 a month the voucher would cover.
“Especially (as) a single parent and having a young child. ... the environment just keeps changing,” she said of being unstably housed. “That’s hard.”
But the voucher — and the house she plans to move into soon — gives her hope.
“I just believe everybody needs a second chance, because there’s a story to tell behind everything,” she said.
Affordable housing crisis
The Charlotte Observer asked housing authority leaders why so few of the emergency HUD vouchers have been used.
Inlivian officials point to the same challenges facing renters in its other voucher programs, including its largest, the Housing Choice program. One in five residents who get one of those vouchers, better known as Section 8, have to return them after an unsuccessful housing search.
Several factors, including not enough landlords who accept vouchers, have made using the emergency vouchers difficult, officials said. Voucher payment standards aren’t keeping up with Charlotte’s rising rents. And the people who have been prioritized for the program, while often in most need of housing, come with additional challenges in their background which stand in the way of housing.
Inlivian partnered with nonprofits and other local groups to identify clients who qualify. Those families then work with housing nonprofit Socialserve to find a rental unit and willing landlord.
“Those federal dollars were fantastic that we needed them for the city,” said Fulton Meachem, Inlivian’s CEO. “We needed these additional vouchers, but what they didn’t create was to create additional housing. We have an extremely tight market here.”
And the new federal program didn’t come with additional funding for the supporting nonprofits to help clients improve their chances in a housing search, such as credit repair or expunging their records, he said.
People who have gotten emergency vouchers have a 98-day housing search on average, Meachem said.
In addition to the three leases that have been signed, 63 households are currently in the housing search, including one with a unit under inspection and four negotiating with landlords, according to Inlivian.
The remaining vouchers are currently unassigned or with tenants that are completing application paperwork.
The slow progress of this emergency voucher program highlights the broader struggle for tenants with a variety of rental subsidies to find housing, leaders involved in the program said. Landlords regularly, for example, reject applicants with past evictions, criminal records, bad credit or gaps in employment.
“The number one word I think about when I think about our affordable housing crisis is scarcity,” said Roof Above CEO Liz Clasen-Kelly, including the number of vouchers available, apartments with appropriate rents and willing landlords.
Four of the approximately 70 people living in a Roof Above shelter who have been referred for a voucher have been approved and are currently looking for units, she said.
“We wanted to be as thoughtful as possible in terms of what households got the vouchers because we know how rare a moment like this is,” she said. “It doesn’t mean we’re not out there working hard and just means that there are barriers in our way.”
Socialserve CEO Tara Peele said the lack of additional federal funding for supportive services mean there isn’t extra help to help clients track down necessary paperwork, like out-of-state birth certificates or new identification cards. And the prioritized groups, including people who are chronically homeless and larger households, present their own challenges.
“These happen to be the two hardest populations to get housed in general,” she said, adding many come with a criminal or eviction history. “It’s harder to get into housing — especially in a competitive market — when you don’t have a squeaky clean housing history.”
She recalled a member of her staff’s brief joy after finding a four-bedroom apartment for a family qualified to rent with a voucher.
They couldn’t move in, though, because the rent was $150 more than the voucher would pay.
HUD vouchers
Many housing authorities across the country have been slow to put these emergency vouchers to use housing people. Cities with huge allotments like Seattle and New York have struggled, according to local reporting.
Fewer than 1 in 4 of the 70,000 vouchers awarded last year are actively in use to help pay for a lease, according to HUD data.
Charlotte’s Inlivian has among the lowest leasing rates in North Carolina, where only 11.2% of the nearly 1,300 vouchers are in use.
Housing authorities in Raleigh, Concord, Greensboro and Winston-Salem have between 5 and 20% of their vouchers in use, according to HUD data. Asheville’s and Wilmington’s usage rates are in the 40s.
There are outliers: the Greenville Housing Authority has leased units for all but one of the 27 vouchers it received last year.
Wayman Williams, who leads the organization, attributes the success to good partnerships on the area’s coordinated entry council, where local nonprofits and service organizations meet weekly to find appropriate support and programs for homeless residents.
He said he expects the last voucher to be in use soon, and hopes his agency’s success will lead to additional voucher awards.
Under a deadline?
HUD guidelines to public housing authorities stated that there will be a process outlined later this year to revoke vouchers from communities for a “failure to use vouchers promptly.”
A department spokesman told the Observer a review will occur in 2023, and HUD continues to provide technical assistance to local housing authorities, including tools for landlord outreach and streamlining the application process.
The federal government has implemented similar use-it-or-lose-it conditions on other pandemic programs, including rent relief. Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, which have been quick to distribute federal money for rent and utilities help, recently received additional funds reallocated from communities that were slow to distribute theirs.
This story was originally published April 15, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
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