Housing cuts would affect thousands in LV

By Christina Littlefield (contact)

Monday, March 29, 2004 | 11:43 a.m.

Proposed cuts of about $1 billion to low-income housing nationwide have Nevada housing authority directors fearing they will have to cut services or lay off staff.

The cuts are part of a massive reform to the Section 8 voucher program proposed by the Housing and Urban Development Department in the 2005 federal budget. The Section 8 program subsidizes rent for those who qualify.

HUD officials and others in the Bush administration say the move from per-unit funding to a set block grants will give housing authorities more flexibility in issuing vouchers and that the program administrative changes will free up more money for services.

But opponents of the plan, who include public housing advocates nationwide, say there is no way the voucher program can sustain services with $1 billion in cuts.

The budget cuts will exacerbate an already bad situation, advocates said, and push more low-income families onto the streets.

"We are constantly trying to keep the front door to homelessness closed and this just seems to widen the door," said Linda Lera-Randle El, founder and executive director of Straight from the Streets and an advocate for the homeless.

Four of the five Nevada housing authority directors visited Washington last week to ask the state's congressional delegation to protest the plan, which they said would lead to a shortfall resulting in the loss of vouchers for 200,000 families nationwide.

The proposed cuts, if passed by Congress, would translate to a loss of about $9.6 million from the 2005 budgets for Nevada housing authorities, said Gus Ramos, deputy executive director for the Clark County Housing Authority and chairman of the Southern Nevada Homeless Coalition.

If that money is eliminated, an estimated 1,331 Nevada families will have to be removed from the rolls in the Las Vegas Valley, Ramos said.

"If you average out four-person families, when you see this number of 1,331 and you multiply that by four or five," thousands of people are affected, Ramos said. "We see the faces of people and we know the frustrations of people in this valley."

Genevieve Joyner, 37, a divorced mother of four, is one of the people the Clark County Housing Authority has helped. Joyner, who has worked full time for the past six years, said she started out on full assistance and slowly worked her way to self-sufficiency. Joyner, a sales representative for Waxy Sanitary Supply, is now about to buy her own home through a housing authority program.

Without that help and the "grace of God," Joyner said, she doesn't know where she would be today.

"I can't even begin to imagine families who are not going to be able to have the assistance anymore," Joyner said. "It's heartbreaking.

"I'm not trying to work the system or anything like that. I work really hard. I'm trying to provide a better home for myself and my kids."

Most of the people receiving vouchers are, as Joyner was, the state's "working poor," Ramos said, and teeter on the brink of homelessness even with the housing subsidy.

Under the current federal regulation, recipients pay 30 percent of their income toward rent, and the housing authority subsidizes the rest.

Las Vegas, North Las Vegas and Clark County housing authorities currently issue housing vouchers to about 8,580 families, seniors and people with disabilities, the authorities' directors said.

All three local housing authorities have waiting lists in the thousands and stopped taking applications more than a year ago, directors said. The average wait for someone to receive a housing voucher is two years.

If Congress passes the current budget cuts, housing authority directors said they would no longer be able to move anyone off those waiting lists. As families move off the subsidies, their vouchers would be eliminated rather than passed to another family until the budget is balanced, Parviz Ghadiri, executive director of the Las Vegas Housing Authority, said. Other housing directors said they would follow a similar plan, but that some families may lose the vouchers they currently have.

In addition to the initial cuts, switching to a block grant would freeze the available funding for Nevada's exponentially growing population, Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., said.

"There is nothing compassionate about this HUD budget," Berkley said. "It cuts money from critical programs that help people with disabilities with their housing needs and help low-income families put a roof over their families' heads.

"For a community like Las Vegas that continues to grow at an unprecedented pace, freezing HUD programs will have devastating consequences."

Proponents of the cuts, however, argue that the reforms give public housing authorities more flexibility in issuing vouchers and more authority to negotiate better rental fees. The changes eliminate several federal requirements that dictated how housing authorities could spend the money, Amy Spanbauer, press secretary for Rep. Jim Gibbons, said.

"This program gives the public housing authorities the flexibility they've been wanting," Spanbauer said.

HUD administrators also say the reforms are needed to restrain the escalating costs of vouchers while still serving the needs of low-income families.

"HUD currently manages a voucher program that has no requirements to contain costs, subsidizes units above market rents, limits local ability to address needs and discourages families from increasing employment and income," Donna White, HUD spokeswoman, said.

Other parts of the proposal loosen the requirements placed on the housing authorities, such as how often units must be inspected. That, in turn, will lead to savings in administrative costs, White said.

Overall the program savings will make up for the budget cuts, she said.

Spanbauer agreed, adding that this year's budget cannot be compared to last year's because the proposed voucher program is substantially different.

"You're comparing apples to oranges," Spanbauer said Wednesday. "There are such drastic changes to it."

Berkley, however, said the talk of reform was just an excuse.

"There is no such thing as reform or flexibility," Berkley said. "Those are buzzwords for block grants to the state and the elimination of critical protections that low income and people with disabilities have under current programs, and sticking the states with the costs."

Ramos and other housing directors said some of the reforms will, eventually, lead to more efficient use of federal money in issuing the housing vouchers and that giving housing authorities more flexibility is a good move. But most of the reforms will take at least two years to implement, Ramos said, and will never come close to supplementing $1 billion in cuts that will hit as soon as October.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., agreed.

"I am very concerned about housing stability for low-income people," Reid said in a statement. "Especially in a questionable economy and when we are facing a near crisis with our health care system. It would be unwise to make even more cuts that hurt those most vulnerable."10"If you average out four-person families, when you see this number of 1,331 families and you multiply that by four or five ... We see the faces of people and we know the frustrations of people in this valley."