Elizabeth Prevish knew it could be tough to find a house to rent in Corvallis, but she had no idea just how hard it would be when she decided to relocate from Redmond in May.
A single mom, Prevish has two sons, ages 3 and 13. The older boy struggles with a serious emotional disorder, and Prevish was thrilled when she got him placed in the Children's Farm Home for inpatient treatment in January.
After months of making the three-hour drive across the mountains to visit her son, she got approval to transfer her federal housing benefits from Deschutes County to the mid-valley - but ran into a brick wall when she tried to use them in Corvallis.
So far, she says, half a dozen local landlords have refused to accept her Section 8 voucher - even though such discrimination is illegal under Oregon fair housing laws.
"One of them listened very intently. He thought it was 'interesting,' but he said he wanted to wait a few days and gather more applicants," Prevish said. "If I tell them up front, they're very quick to say it's not going to work out."
She's had some short-term rentals in Lebanon and Albany, but both were too far from the Farm Home, and she had to leave the last one after getting into a dispute with her landlord over maintenance issues. Since then, she's had no permanent address. After spending a week in a homeless shelter, Prevish and her younger son are now staying in a donated camp trailer in a church parking lot while she continues to look for a house in Corvallis.
But time is running out.
If Prevish can't secure housing by Nov. 7, she could lose her Section 8 voucher.
And there's an even more pressing consideration: Until she can establish a stable housing situation, the Children's Farm Home wants to keep her teenage boy in residential treatment. For now, he's only allowed off the grounds for brief visitation periods.
"I need to provide a home for my son to be discharged to," Prevish said.
A helping hand
The Section 8 program was created in 1974 as an amendment to the U.S. Housing Act of 1937. Administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, it provides federally funded assistance to poor families, the elderly and the disabled to help them afford safe, decent and sanitary housing. To qualify for a voucher from their local housing authority, recipients generally must earn less than half the median income for the area where they live. Most recipients earn less than 30 percent.
Unlike so-called project-based assistance, which is tied to individual buildings or housing projects, Section 8 vouchers are intended to be used on the private rental market. Recipients must pay about 30 percent of their monthly adjusted gross income for rent and utilities, with the remainder being paid by the local public housing authority.
The amount of assistance for each voucher is determined by family size and other factors and is supposed to reflect local market rates for various-sized dwellings, though the "fair market rents" set by housing authorities often lag behind in tight markets such as Corvallis and Albany. A voucher can't be used if rent and utility costs for a unit exceed the voucher's level of assistance, and property owners are not required to lower their rents to accommodate Section 8 recipients.
Fair housing laws in Oregon have long prohibited landlords from discriminating against tenants on the basis of race, religion, nationality, family or marital status, gender, sexual orientation or disability.
Source of income is also a protected category, but Oregon law used to provide an exemption for federal housing subsidies such as Section 8 vouchers.
That changed July 1, when House Bill 2639, also known as the Housing Choice Act, closed that loophole. Specifically, it says landlords can't reject a prospective tenant solely for wanting to use a Section 8 voucher to pay rent.
Pockets of resistance
Clearly, some landlords haven't gotten the message.
Bob Loewen, a rental housing specialist with the city of Corvallis, said at least a dozen property owners in Linn and Benton counties still have a blanket policy against accepting the vouchers.
"What I have seen is in Craigslist ads that still say 'no HUD,' 'no housing assistance,' in some cases 'no Section 8,'" Loewen said.
So far, all the landlords in violation that he's contacted have been small operators who say they were unaware of the new law. Loewen said all the large rental management firms he works with appear to be in compliance, but he also knows there are some property owners who just don't want to work with the program.
"There are people who think anyone who's getting government assistance isn't working hard, needs to go get a job and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, that sort of thing," he said.
That attitude is not limited to the mid-valley.
Pegge McGuire, executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Oregon, said her agency gets about a dozen calls a week from around the state, ranging from property owners with questions about the law to Section 8 recipients whose vouchers have been turned down. And while she has no firm numbers on how many people have been improperly denied housing, her experience tells her the steady trickle of complaints indicates a much larger problem.
"In general ... only one in 10 people who experience illegal discrimination try to do anything about it," she said.
As Loewen indicated, McGuire said big property management firms seem to be on board with the new law, with most of the refusals seemingly associated with mom-and-pop rental property owners. And, for the most part, the Section 8 rejections appear to stem from ignorance rather than malice - but not always.
"In some cases, we're getting a little pushback from people who say, 'We don't have to take those.' Well, yes, you do," McGuire said.
"We're still finding Craigslist ads and other ads where landlords are blatantly discriminating against Section 8."
Education versus enforcement
The law includes a number of protections for property owners.
First of all, it doesn't force landlords to rent to someone just because they're on Section 8 - it merely requires them to consider all rental applicants equally, whether they have a voucher or not. And while a property must pass a basic safety inspection to qualify for Section 8 payments, owners can't be forced to make expensive repairs just because they're requested by a HUD inspector.
In addition, the Housing Choice Act set up a state-supported fund to reimburse landlords who have trouble collecting on court judgments against irresponsible tenants, up to $5,000.
But the law also has teeth: Property owners can be fined up to $11,000 for discriminating against Section 8 recipients.
So far, the Fair Housing Council is still in education mode, choosing to talk to landlords about the law rather than punish them for breaking it.
Only three formal complaints have been filed to date with the Bureau of Labor and Industries, the state agency charged with enforcing the Housing Choice Act. But enforcement actions are likely to ramp up once housing officials judge that landlords have had enough time to adapt to the new requirements.
Tina Kotek, speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives, thinks there's been enough time already.
The Portland Democrat used her political clout to push the Housing Choice Act through the Legislature after a series of newspaper articles in the Oregonian documented how Section 8 recipients were being locked into blighted neighborhoods because they were unable to use their vouchers in more desirable parts of town.
As HB 2639 was being drafted in 2012, Kotek said, she worked closely with rental property interests to address the concerns of landlords. And even after the bill was passed in the 2013 session, implementation was delayed until this July to allow more time for notification.
By now, Kotek said, landlords should be fully aware of the new law - and low-income renters should be able to take full advantage of it.
"It's actually a very difficult rental market in lots of places, and you don't want to disadvantage someone just because they have a voucher," she said.
According to HUD, there are 33,776 Section 8 vouchers in Oregon worth more than $188 million in annual rent payments. Kotek said that makes Section 8 the biggest affordable housing program in Oregon, and low-income households struggling to find a decent place to live should be able to use it in the neighborhood of their choice.
"It's a basic fairness issue that was the starting point (for the Housing Choice Act), but the bigger issue is we have an affordable housing problem in Oregon," Kotek said.
"We have to have a menu of items to help people have access to more affordable, quality housing."
Demand and supply
The need for housing assistance has never been greater here in the mid-valley, where hundreds of families lost their homes in the Great Recession.
"We're dealing with yesterday's middle class," said Linn-Benton Housing Authority Executive Director Donna Holt.
"We have people pull into our parking lot and they have children living in a van. We see it every day. It's heart-wrenching."
About 2,500 mid-valley households currently have Section 8 vouchers, and there are another 3,000 names on the waiting list - and it can take two to three years to get to the head of the line. And once people get a voucher, they have 60 days to use it or lose it. If they can't find a place to rent after two months, their voucher goes to the next person on the waiting list.
According to housing authority figures, only 62 percent of Linn County recipients are able to find Section 8 housing before their vouchers expire. The success rate in Benton County is just 53 percent.
The Housing Choice Act won't make any more vouchers available - only additional funding from HUD can do that - but it could give renters more housing options.
"That's certainly our hope," said Jennifer Sanders, chief operations officer for the Linn-Benton Housing Authority. "But we haven't seen any improvement yet ... . I think it's too early to tell yet if this is going to make a difference."
Like the Fair Housing Council, the Linn-Benton Housing Authority is working on educating property owners and managers about the new anti-discrimination requirements, as well as the benefits of working with the Section 8 program. And those efforts appear to be paying dividends.
Duerksen & Associates, which manages almost 1,000 units in the Corvallis-Albany area, stopped accepting Section 8 vouchers for a while but is now working with the program again. Dawn Duerksen, a licensed property manager with the company, said it's been a positive experience.
The HUD inspection process is more streamlined than it's been in the past, the paperwork isn't hard to fill out, and housing authority officials have been very open about the applicant's rental history with the Section 8 program, she said.
"We didn't understand how we could use the housing authority to find a good tenant," Duerksen said. "You're getting an extra reference with them ... so it can be a good thing."
Scott Lepman of Lepman Properties, which owns and manages rental units in Albany, said he's worked with the program for years and hasn't found Section 8 tenants any more troublesome than other renters.
The application requirements for Section 8 weed out some unsavory characters before a voucher is issued - convicted sex offenders, violent criminals and drug dealers, for instance, don't qualify for the program.
But the real key to making sure you don't rent to a bad Section 8 tenant, Lepman said, is simply to apply the same screening criteria most landlords use for every rental applicant: a good rental history with no previous evictions, an adequate income-to-rent ratio, a clean criminal background check and a solid credit rating.
"I think a lot of landlords prefer not to rent to Section 8 people, but our experience is it isn't the Section 8 that's the problem they perceive," he said. "It's people - whether they screen people correctly or not."
Beyond that, he thinks programs like Section 8 provide important social benefits.
"If you look back in history, what they used to do is warehouse poor people in large projects," Lepman said.
"Their life chances will be much better if they're introduced to the general population, where they're exposed to what other tenants do ... assimilation of those people is not a bad thing, it's a good thing. That's my opinion."
One more chance
For Elizabeth Prevish, things may be starting to look up.
She recently found a manufactured home a few miles south of Corvallis that fits her needs - with a landlord who was willing to accept Section 8. The monthly rent was a little more than her benefits will cover, but the owner agreed to lower the rent if he could make up the difference by charging a monthly fee for the washer and dryer (a common tactic in high-rent areas).
The place also needs some improvements - a HUD inspector identified nine repairs that must be made to meet Section 8 standards for safety and habitability.
The landlord told Prevish he's willing to do the work, but she's a little worried. Some of the repairs could be costly, and she's afraid he might change his mind about spending the money - especially if he finds another renter in the meantime.
"He still has the property up on Craigslist, and that gives me an uneasy feeling," she said.
And if the deal does fall through, Prevish said, she doesn't know what she'll do next. She's running out of options - and energy.
"I have stopped looking for other places because I am completely worn out," she said. "I'm tired."
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