Brandi Payne, a housing specialist at Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia (Photo by Dominic Hernandez)
“Where do you really want to live?”
It’s such a simple question. But for many families, it’s a revelation.
“Nobody ever asked me, ‘Where would I love to live?’ ” families often tell Brenda Hicks, director of the Center for Housing Counseling & Education at Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia (HOME). They get emotional, she says, and then, they begin to describe their dreams. A place in a better school district. A place near a grocery store. A house, not an apartment, with a yard for the kids to run in.
The Move to Opportunity program offered by HOME helps people with housing vouchers move out of areas where poverty is concentrated, into parts of Richmond and the counties that are more economically diverse, with no more than 20 percent of people living in poverty.
This simple change can make an enormous difference for children. A newly released study from HOME, the University of Richmond and the VCU School of Education revealed that housing segregation in Richmond leads directly to school segregation: “The typical black student, for instance, heads to a school in which roughly two out of three of their peers are low-income, compared to about one in four for the typical white, Asian or non-poor student. These differences matter because racially unequal exposure to poverty helps drive achievement gaps.”
A major 2015 study found that the area where a child grows up “has significant causal effects on her prospects for upward mobility.” The younger a child is when her family moves to a better neighborhood, the greater the improvement in her future income. Those who never move have dramatically higher odds of remaining poor in adulthood.
That means the clock is ticking for every family with children that comes to HOME for help. But despite the best efforts of housing specialists like HOME’s Brandi Payne, many picket-fence dreams crash to earth.
The Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority (RRHA) is in the process of offering housing vouchers to 500 families that had been on its wait list, resulting in a flood of calls to Payne’s phone. “There’s literally 499 people out there shopping with you,” she tells them, and “all of them want a single-family home.”
Of every 10 people who call Payne, seven or eight need to live on a bus line to get to work. “That pretty much X-es out all of Chesterfield County,” she says. Others say they want a house, not an apartment, but they realize they don’t have the budget for higher utility and maintenance bills. “Sometimes [they] can be really tearful conversations,” Payne says. While HOME counselors usually use computers to house shop, lately they’ve been driving some clients around, hoping to spot For Rent signs.
Are there enough houses for voucher holders? “Oh, absolutely not!” Hicks exclaims.
Contrary to popular belief, vouchers do not equate to free rent: Tenants pay 30 percent of their income toward the rent; the voucher pays the rest. Housing-choice vouchers are federally funded and administered primarily by RRHA. Anyone whose income is less than half of the area median income (AMI) can apply, but most vouchers are given to families who earn less than 30 percent of the AMI. That’s $24,600 for a family of four.
It’s up to individual landlords whether to accept vouchers. The big perk for them: guaranteed rent. The voucher portion is paid automatically, and tenants must pay their part on time or risk losing the assistance. Landlords whose properties are in a neighborhood with less than 10 percent poverty are eligible for a special tax credit.
Yet landlords with desirable properties — in areas like the West End, Short Pump and Midlothian — are tough to find. Many believe that participating in the voucher program means piles of paperwork and agonizing bureaucratic delays. That was true once, Payne says, but RRHA has since streamlined its processes.
Another problem, she says, is that landlords “hold onto the old stereotypes — not only [about] the housing authority, but [about] what a voucher holder is.” Some landlords think voucher tenants won’t take care of their property. But they have to be responsible tenants, Payne says, in order to get a required letter of reference from their landlord. HOME offers landlord and tenant education classes to help overcome some of these misconceptions. Two weeks ago, the Community Foundation gave HOME $75,000 to support its work toward that end. In the meantime, counselors keep working with one family at a time.
Voucher holder Shannon Laidley was living near White Oak Village in eastern Henrico County. For the sake of her three children, she yearned to move somewhere safer, where “not a whole lot of stuff is going on in the neighborhood,” she says. Payne helped her identify possibilities, and a friend of Laidley’s suggested the Creekpointe Apartments in Midlothian. Perfect, Payne told her.
Laidley finally found “all the things that I was looking for,” she says. “I actually love it out here.” She lives just minutes from her job at Brandermill Woods’ assisted-living facility. The neighborhood is peaceful. The only downside is the bugs: “The mosquitoes are so disrespectful — they bite through your clothes,” she says with a laugh.
Laidley’s new goal is to get into HOME’s homeownership program. “And the next time I want to move,” she says, “I want to be in my own home.”
Never miss a Sunday Story: Sign up for the newsletter, and we’ll drop a fresh read into your inbox at the start of each week. To keep up with the latest posts, search for the hashtag #SundayStory on Twitter and Facebook.
