Long Beach is inching closer to a deadline when they’ll have to kick hundreds of formerly homeless people off of a federal housing assistance program. On Wednesday, a top homelessness official estimated 375 households will lose their benefits as of October, leaving them at risk of sliding back into homelessness.
The deadline is looming after Congress decided against authorizing new funding for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Emergency Housing Voucher program.
The pandemic-era program, launched in 2021, distributed about 70,000 Emergency Housing Vouchers — or EHVs — across the country. Long Beach received 582, and originally expected them to run through 2030, but local officials say rising rent costs drained the funding more quickly than anticipated.
When funding runs dry, Long Beach will be forced to end EHVs for the 500 local households that still rely on them, according to Homeless Services Bureau Manager Paul Duncan, who gave an update on the program Wednesday at the city’s Homeless Services Advisory Committee meeting. Duncan said 125 households will be given a new type of HUD voucher meant to ease the shock of losing EHVs, but that leaves 375 in the lurch.
How will Long Beach pick who gets kicked off?
“That’s a bigger question at this moment that we have not gotten to,” Duncan said.
For now, all EHV recipients have been moved to the top of the waiting list for Housing Choice Voucher, commonly called Section 8, but there’s no guarantee they’ll receive one before the deadline.
Duncan said the city plans to give recipients at least 60 days’ notice before their rental assistance runs out.
This has left many EHV recipients in limbo, including a single mom named Wiley who showed up to the meeting where Duncan was speaking.
Wiley, who declined to give her last name out of fear that speaking with the media could hurt her chances of receiving a new voucher, said her EHV has been instrumental in keeping her in stable housing.
She was laid off from her health care job shortly after getting her voucher. The rental assistance she receives — 30% of her $2,000 rent — helped her save enough money to sign up for classes at Long Beach City College. She’s nearing the end of an internship to become a radiology technologist, a job that specializes in conducting X-Rays on patients.
For months, while juggling a full class load and a 24-hour-per-week internship, Wiley has been emailing “all kinds of city, state [and] federal representatives” hoping to get a straight answer on what will happen when funding runs out for EHVs.
After Wednesday’s meeting, she left without a clear picture of how she will be affected.