After Carolyn Lambert, 64, had a stroke last year, she knew she would need help keeping a roof over her head.
Her only income is Social Security Insurance, which leaves her with $11 after she pays her rent.
Family members often helped her with food, prescriptions or other basic expenses, but after her stroke, Lambert was hit with additional medical costs.
The day after she returned home from the hospital, she called Northwest Pilot Project, a Portland social service agency that serves low-income elderly people.
As Lambert explained her situation, the caseworker told Lambert she was eligible for a new program Northwest Pilot Project was testing.
The program gives seniors and people on fixed incomes, such as Social Security Disability Insurance, a permanent voucher to help pay their rent.
Vouchers are typically used in the federal government’s Section 8 and housing choice programs, to subsidize the rent of a qualifying person so that they only pay 30 percent of their income toward their housing. A person is considered to be living in affordable housing if they spend no more than 30 percent of their income on rent.
It’s one of the federal government’s biggest housing programs to help low-income individuals and families afford housing.
The pilot project spearheaded by Northwest Pilot Project uses vouchers from Home Forward, the region’s housing authority. However, it can take months between the time a participant enters the program and when he or she receive their voucher. Meyer Memorial Trust provided the supplemental funding to pay the rent of participants during that gap.
“I didn’t believe it,” Lambert said. “It took me a little while to believe that it was true.”
Lambert joined the program. The voucher now pays two-thirds of her rent; she pays the other third.
“You let your breath out,” Lambert said.
But can local government-funded vouchers perform a similar function?
A new pilot project, building on the one created by the Northwest Pilot Project, will test that concept in the next year.
This new pilot project, funded with $375,000 from the Joint Office of Homeless Services, will provide vouchers to 50 people on fixed incomes who live in housing affordable to people who earn 60 percent of the area median family income, or $43,980 for a family of four. The vouchers will be disbursed later this year.
There is little question that giving vouchers to impoverished people to pay a portion of their rent is effective. The larger question is whether it can end homelessness and displacement at a low cost and, if so, if local government can afford to increase the program.
Approximately 18,000 Multnomah County residents receive disability checks through the federal government’s Social Security disability program.
The maximum amount a person can receive each month is $735. Annual cost-of-living adjustments in the last seven years, according to federal data, are less than 2 percent each year. A 0.3 percent increase was made in 2017. Low-income seniors who rely solely on Social Security Insurance as their monthly income, like Lambert, have similar incomes that are low and fixed.
A person receiving Social Security Disability Insurance can afford to rent a unit priced at $221 a month, according to “Out of Reach,” an annual report from National Low Income Housing Coalition released earlier this month.
The report ranks Oregon as 18th in the nation and shows that a person must make $19.78 an hour, working full time for the entire year to afford average apartment rent.
What a person on disability can reasonably afford is well below the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the city, which is now over $1,100 a month.
It’s another statistic among many that confirms it is impossible for someone who relies solely upon a Social Security disability or insurance check to afford an apartment in the Portland area.
“Their fixed incomes create very significant challenges for them to find rental housing,” said Marc Jolin, the director of the Joint Office of Homeless Services.
The biggest problem – which locally, vouchers may be able to solve – is that the fixed amount of a person’s disability or insurance check is unchanging.
“That’s not a temporary circumstance,” Jolin said, adding that the gap between their income and their rent will persist.
“If we want to help them stay off the street,” he said, “we have to find a way to sustain the rental assistance.”
The voucher pilot program is the brainchild of Bobby Weinstock, a housing advocate with Northwest Pilot Project. So strong is his advocacy for vouchers that Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury jokingly refers to the pilot project as “the Bobby Weinstock voucher.”
For years, Weinstock has advocated for increasing the amount of affordable housing in the Portland region. Since the 1990s, Northwest Pilot Project has published an inventory of low-income affordable housing in the inner city, showing a gradual loss of affordable housing.
According to the most recent report, Multnomah County needs to build 23,585 housing units affordable to the lowest income renters in order to meet demand.
Weinstock became convinced vouchers could play a larger role in reducing homelessness and displacement after he saw how instrumental they were in ending homeless in the Portland region. Since 2015, more than 1,200 homeless veterans have been placed into permanent housing, largely due to a massive influx of vouchers specifically for homeless and low-income veterans.
Weinstock said this realization amounted to an epiphany. The fundamental problem that leads to homelessness and housing instability, in his mind, he said, is that “people don’t have enough money to pay market level rents.”
This means that if the gap between what a person can afford and the rent of the apartment unit or home they live in is closed, the person would not have to move due to a rent increase.
“My belief now is that the key to ending homelessness is basically to help low-income people to afford their rent over the long run,” Weinstock said.
“I think one of the weaknesses of our system is that we have been providing short-term assistance to people who need long-term help,” he continued. “A voucher is long term.”
Rutger Bregman echoed the idea that poverty and related issues, such as housing instability, is due to a simple lack of money. Bregman is a historian who gave a TED talk advocating for combating poverty by giving everyone a basic income.
“Poverty is a lack of cash,” he said during the talk.
In November 2015, Northwest Pilot Project, the Urban League of Portland and Home Forward, the region’s federal housing agency, launched the first pilot project to test the effectiveness of a locally funded voucher program with funding from the Meyer Memorial Trust.
Home Forward supplied 60 of its housing choice vouchers for the program, something the housing agency is able to do because the federal government allows Home Forward to use some of its vouchers for innovative programs.
The project targeted seniors on fixed incomes, who were facing rent increases they could not afford and who would likely be forced to move. The project was designed to test whether a voucher could prevent those seniors from being displaced from inner North and Northeast Portland neighborhoods, where many of them had lived for many years.
All 60 of the vouchers were used, and at the end of the pilot year, only two households did not remain in their housing: One person moved to assisted living, and another person died.
“It confirmed that vouchers are probably the most powerful tool to create housing stability for low-income people in the long run,” Weinstock said.
Elisa Harrigan, Meyer Memorial Trust’s Affordable Housing Initiative program officer, said the pilot program is one of the most successful affordable housing initiatives that the Trust has funded.
“We’re seeing folks being pushed out of their communities and being priced out of where they’re living, particularly seniors,” she said. “It’s more cost effective to help people stay in place.”
Program participants lived in their housing for an average of 11 years, according to Northwest Pilot Project's final report.
The report showed the average monthly income of the 60 participants was $1,119, and the average rent they paid before receiving the voucher was $901 – approximately 81 percent of their income.
After receiving the voucher for two-thirds of their rent, the contribution the individuals made was $242 per month.
“It was wonderful to not move,” Lambert said. Suddenly having hundreds of extra dollars each month from her Social Security insurance check has improved her life in other ways.
She no longer asks family members to help her pay for medications and other expenses. “Nobody would have let me slip through the cracks,” she said of her family. “But you don’t want to ask. They have their own homes, their own lives.”
She also felt comfortable adopting a kitten – something she would not have done had she not been sure if she could stay in her home. “It let me get a little spirit in, a little life I got to say yes to,” Lambert said.
Barbara Ekong has lived in her apartment in the Woodlawn neighborhood since 2003. Like many Portlanders, her rent has increased again and again. She receives $907 a month in Social Security.
Last year, her rent was raised to $1,005. “I just couldn’t afford it,” she said.
She joined the pilot program last year, and she now pays $272 toward her rent. “I have other bills,” she said. “Before I got the voucher, I was lucky if I had $50 for the month.”
Without the voucher, Ekong doesn’t think she could have found another apartment. “I would probably be out on the street. It alleviated a lot of pressure off me.”
Other cities have started local voucher programs to prevent displacement and homelessness.
Washington, D.C., started its Local Rent Supplement Program in 2007, which now subsidizes the rent of 1,718 households that make less than 30 percent of median income. The district’s Housing Production Trust Fund pays for the program with deed record and transfer taxes it collects.
Chicago started a trust fund in 1989 that now subsidizes the rent of 2,800 households, by bridging the gap between the rent of the housing unit and 30 percent of the family’s income. To be eligible for the program, a family of four must make $24,250 a year or less.
“The Trust Fund plays an essential role in keeping Chicago affordable for all its citizens,” according to a guide detailing the program.
New York City has a similar program that provides rent subsidies for qualifying people who live in homeless and domestic violence shelters.
As the Joint Office’s voucher pilot project rolls out this year, Jolin, Weinstock and others will examine how local vouchers can best be used and if the local government can administer them effectively at low cost.
“The basic notion that they’re more likely to be housed stably with a voucher, we know that’s true,” Jolin said.
“The question is,” he said, “are we using these vouchers in the right way, with the right population?”
If a locally funded voucher program becomes permanent in Multnomah County and receives more funding to pay for more vouchers, is it appropriate to use those vouchers exclusively for seniors and disabled people on fixed incomes? Or exclusively for homeless people? Or the working poor? Or a combination?
The bigger question is how much money the city of Portland and Multnomah County are willing to put forth for a local voucher program in the future.
Weinstock estimates it would cost $6 million to fund 1,000 vouchers. “Taking local voucher programs to scale is a significant financial challenge,” Jolin said.
“We don’t print money,” said Portland City Commissioner Nick Fish, who is an advocate for local voucher program. “Our capacity to fund all these urgent needs is going to be really challenged.”
This local voucher program is just one on a growing list of effective, federally funded, anti-poverty programs that, facing draconian cuts, local governments must ask if they can and should begin funding.