In an effort to punch a dent in Marin County’s affordable housing crisis, county supervisors will spend $450,000 over the next two years on a pilot program aimed at enticing more landlords into renting to holders of Section 8 housing vouchers.
The Marin Housing Authority, which manages the federally funded Section 8 program, is authorized to issue up to 2,162 vouchers; but only 1,954 are currently in use — even though there are 5,026 people on the waiting list to get a voucher.
Kimberly Carroll, a deputy director for the Marin Housing Authority, said the authority has issued vouchers to 152 people since the beginning of the year and only 68 have found housing.
Carroll said the vacancy rate in Marin is hovering around 1 to 2 percent and many landlords who do have vacancies aren’t accepting Section 8 vouchers.
“So folks can’t find units to use their vouchers in Marin,” she said.
The bulk of the money allocated by county supervisors, about $400,000, will be used to create a loss mitigation fund to compensate landlords if their property is damaged by voucher holders. The fund would also pay landlords up to a month’s rent if their unit remained vacant between voucher holders occupying it.
And the new landlord incentive program will dangle some additional financial carrots.
Property owners who rent half of their units to voucher holders and want to make repairs or improvements will have their building and permit fees waived by the county. And federal funds will be tapped to offer property owners renting more than half of their units to voucher holders loans of up to $50,000 for rehab or repair of their units.
The program also includes non-financial components.
The Housing Authority will establish a dedicated phone line to guarantee timely response to landlords who need assistance with tenants using vouchers. The authority will offer more frequent inspections of units rented to voucher holders and assistance in filling unoccupied units.
The landlord incentive program is the chief product of a series of workshops supervisors held last fall on the housing crisis.
SURGE IN RENTAL COSTS
At a December meeting, county planners told supervisors that average apartment rents in Marin had jumped by 75 percent since 2005 to $2,583 per month, and that other data sources indicated that the median rent for an apartment was even higher, at about $3,000 per month. They estimated that using federal affordability standards, a Marin household would need to earn $8,610 per month, or $103,320 per year after taxes, to afford the average rental in Marin.
A Marin rental housing survey conducted earlier that year found that 32 percent of the respondents were spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing while 46 percent were paying 30 to 50 percent of their income.
The planners recommended that the supervisors consider rent control coupled with eviction safeguards and relocation assistance. But supervisors rejected those suggestions.
Instead, Supervisor Damon Connolly organized a committee whose members included Marin landlords and Marin Housing Authority staff members.
“One issue that kept coming up was all of the calls my office was getting were from people who were having trouble with their Section 8 vouchers,” Connolly said. “The Section 8 program in Marin is a $30 million investment of federal funds, and it seemed that we could be doing better in leveraging that funding towards getting people housed. We set about understanding this issue from the perspective of local landlords — as they are the critical partners in the Section 8 program.”
‘LANDLORD FRIENDLY’
It was out of this committee that the landlord incentive program was born. One of the members of the committee is Melissa Prandi, whose firm, Prandi Property Management, manages 600 properties throughout Marin.
“We’ve already started taking the vouchers based on what I call the new program. It’s very landlord friendly,” Prandi said.
Prandi said besides the financial incentives, the new program aims at better informing landlords about how the Section 8 program works. The Housing Authority has assembled a list of things it wants landlords to know. For example: rents can be raised on Section 8 tenants with 60 days notice; Section 8 tenants can be given less than a 90-day notice to vacate if there is a good cause; and rents can exceed Marin Housing Authority payment standards after a tenant moves in.
Another member of the committee is Bobby Elam, president of the Marin Income Property Association and a landlord himself. Elam said another aspect of the program is the appointment of a landlord liaison.
“This really interests me,” Elam said, “because the biggest complaint I’ve ever heard about Section 8 has to do with what do you do if you have an issue with a tenant and you need help.”
GAP IN FEDERAL AID
There are some issues, however, that the new incentive program isn’t designed to address — most notably, the gap between the cost of rental housing in Marin and what the federal government will pay. For example, Carroll said that while the going rate for many one-bedroom apartments in Marin is $2,200 a month, the maximum amount a voucher holder can pay for a one-bedroom is $1,706.
“Rents have gone up so fast and so far that vouchers don’t cover the market rents,” said Dave Coury, a landlord and housing advocate. “I think the program would be much more effective if it were implemented with some rent stabilization.”