The housing authority that provides federal low-income housing to the northeastern corner of Oregon hopes to launch a housing navigator program this spring in the hopes of helping impoverished people who face multiple obstacles when getting into housing.
The Northeast Oregon Housing Authority, which serves Baker, Grant, Union and Wallowa counties, plans to hire one full-time person by this summer who will provide intensive case management to the housing authority’s clients. Those services will range from helping them find affordable housing to connecting them to social service providers throughout northeastern Oregon that provide mental health and substance abuse treatment, case management and other services.
“We need that piece where any agency has all the answers and a client immediately has all the resources they need,” said Dale Inslee, the housing authority’s executive director.
The housing authority plans to hire one full-time person who will work exclusively in Union County, where the housing authority is based in La Grande. The housing authority is currently seeking grant funding for the navigator’s salary.
If the program is successful and funding can be secured, the housing authority hopes to hire three additional navigators to work in the three other counties in the coming years.
A housing navigator is a case worker that specializes in helping clients find affordable rental housing. Navigators will often help their clients fill out applications for housing, join waitlists, communicate directly with potential landlords, and help their clients deal with obstacles that would prevent them from passing background checks, including credit counseling and, if possible expunging criminal records.
Sarah Parker, the Northeast Oregon Housing Authority’s deputy executive director, said the need for such case workers in northeastern Oregon is dire. The housing authority currently has 867 vouchers, with approximately 70 people currently looking for a rental unit. Parker expects that number to increases; in early May, the housing authority gave vouchers to 300 people who had been on the authority’s waiting list.
A Section 8 voucher pays two-thirds of a person’s rent. Once someone receives a voucher, they are responsible for applying for, and finding, a rental unit, which housing authority staff will help their clients do through case management.
People have six months to find a rental. If they don’t within that time, they lose the voucher.
Nearly 30% of people who have a voucher from the Northeast Oregon Housing Authority end up losing their voucher. Increasingly, that is due to the shortage of affordable housing in the region.
According to data from the state, there is a shortage of 3,057 units of housing that are both affordable and available to rent in northeastern Oregon, for a population of 12,808.
FURTHER READING: How rural is rural? Housing advocates want narrower definition
The housing authority budgets $1,100 of monthly rent per voucher, which, even a few years ago, was more than enough to pay for a rental unit. Parker said that three-bedroom apartments in the region rented for between $600 and $700 a month.
The rent has sky-rocketed since then, she said, with units renting for between $1,000 and $1,400 a month.
It is illegal to discriminate against tenants who have a Section 8 voucher, but the competitiveness of the rental market makes it even more difficult for Section 8 voucher holders to find a housing unit.
LA GRANDE, THE POPULATION CENTER in Union County, is the home of Eastern Oregon University. Students seeking off-campus housing are increasingly contributing to the housing crunch, Parker said.
The number of homeless people in the region is small, in the dozens in Wallowa County to a few hundred in Union County. Many of them, Parker and others said, camp in the forests when it is warm enough to do so, then seek housing and other services during the winter, adding to the demand for affordable housing.
“All these issues are affecting housing,” Inslee said. “Landlords are (not) incentivized to rent to a troubled tenant.”
The program is based off a pilot project that Home Forward, the Portland metropolitan area’s housing authority, operated from mid-2016 to the end of 2017.
Called the Housing Search Advocate Program, the program was created at the height of the housing crisis in Portland, defined by rising rents, rising homelessness and a shortage of affordable housing.
At the time, fewer and fewer people with Section 8 vouchers in the Portland area were finding a rental before their voucher expired.
Between 2011 and 2012, the number of people able to find a rental before their voucher expired fell from 92% to 83%. That trend continued: by the end of 2015, approximately 73% of people with Section 8 vouchers were able to find a rental unit.
Home Forward already had case managers who helped clients find housing, by referring them to social service agencies and housing developers that provided affordable housing, contacting landlords who had rented to people with Section 8 vouchers in the past, and so on.
But the case managers “have very limited capacity to assist families with the housing search, especially for tenants with higher needs,” the report reads.
Home Forward partnered with two social service agencies, Human Solutions, which provides services to homeless families, and Transition Projects, one of the largest social service agencies in Portland, both of which contributed the equivalent of 3.4 full-time housing navigator positions to provide housing services to Home Forward’s clients.
Home Forward referred their most difficult cases to the navigators, people who were nearing the date their voucher would expire, had either no income or income from public assistance, had received no cause evictions and suddenly had to move even though they didn’t have the money to do so, and people with language barriers, disabilities, and other challenges that made finding housing extremely difficult.
A total of 94 households were referred to the program.
The success rate of the number of people who got into housing as a result of the increased case management was 77%, compared to a 53% rate of people who had been referred to the program but had not yet started receiving the program’s services.
On average, clients signed a rental lease within 95 days of receiving their voucher, compared to 121 days for people who were referred to the program but had not started receiving the program’s services.
The program continued through the end of 2017 but ended, since Home Forward stopped accepting new people on the waiting list for vouchers in 2016.
The Northeast Oregon Housing Authority hopes to make its navigator program more encompassing than Home Forward’s. In addition to housing placement services, Parker hopes the navigators will connect their clients with other services – be it applying for food stamps, energy assistance, other public assistance programs, making sure that a family’s children are in school, and so on – that they need.
Parker said that the sheer geographic size of the northeastern Oregon, an area more than 12,000 square miles in size, makes it difficult for people to access services. Someone living in Enterprise in Wallowa County, for example, would have to drive more than two hours to reach the housing authority’s office in La Grande.
Not all services are located in the same town, and not all services have satellite offices scattered throughout the region.
“Geographically, everything’s not located in a convenient little box,” Parker said.
FURTHER READING: Ontario, Oregon: A Section 8 pit stop turned long-term stay
LIKE ANY SOCIAL SERVICE AGENCY, the housing authority’s most difficult cases are people who have multiple challenges preventing them from getting into housing – not just a low income, but a criminal background, or challenges with mental health or substance abuse, disabilities and other problems.
On top of that, Parker said, people are simply unaware of the services that are available to them, unaware of how to find them, and often ashamed to ask for help. Parker said that she and others working in social service in northeastern Oregon constantly battle against a deep sense of stigma that exists in the sparsely populated, very rural region of the state where resilience is prized and people are expected to not rely on others for help.
FURTHER READING: In rural Oregon, trips to food banks are the new normal
When they do come seeking assistance, people are often routed and referred from one agency to another – if someone comes to a housing agency seeking housing but needs mental health treatment, they’ll be referred to a medical clinic. The steady string of referrals from one agency to another, each with more people to meet, more paperwork to fill out, is deflating and discouraging.
After they’re referred to a second person or second agency, Parker said many people “shut down.”
“When you’re unstable … or on the cusp of falling apart, the last thing on your mind is ‘do I need mental health services?’ or ‘how do I apply for food stamps?’” Parker said.
“We’re trying to fill that gap,” Parker said by having the purpose of the housing navigator to “bringing all these players under one umbrella.”