Nailing It Down

By Dave Murnen and Pat Beaty

Homelessness is a huge, complex problem. As the number of homeless people keeps growing, lasting answers have so far been elusive.

But helpful changes are happening.

Thanks to a set of recently enacted state laws, we see some positive steps toward addressing certain aspects of the homeless and subsidized housing problem.

In Grays Harbor, the best estimates are that up to 3,000 people have no stable housing. That is, some primarily rotate around staying with various friends and family, sleeping on couches, with no real place to call home. Of that number, some 500 to 700 are what you might consider “typically” homeless — that is, they are sleeping in cars and under bridges or tarps, with no real shelter at all.

Cassie Lentz, housing coordinator for Grays Harbor County’s Public Health and Social Services Department, provided us with those numbers as well as some additional insights into some new laws that are intended to build capacity of available housing. One of the laws advocates for potential tenants, and the other incentivizes renting to low-income people.

Homelessness is indeed very complex because we are human and individuals with different needs, but we feel these two pieces of legislation are a balanced beginning.

“One of the primary drivers of homelessness,” Lentz said, “is the disparity between the number of units of affordable housing and the number of people who need that housing. Simply put, there is not enough housing on the private market to meet the need.

“Because of this supply issue, competition is fierce for those units that come available and are also affordable,” she said.

Lentz said money is available through various programs to pay for part or all of the housing costs for people who would be otherwise homeless. And additional support is available through agencies such as the Coastal Community Action Program that address some of the reasons behind homelessness. For instance, there’s often help available for finding work and addressing mental health and addiction issues.

“However, historically landlords have been hesitant to rent to clients working with these housing programs, making it harder to find an available unit and move them out of homelessness even when there is program funding available to do so,” she said.

So, it became a sort of chicken-and-egg dilemma. Landlords didn’t want to risk renting to people with an unstable history; but these people couldn’t stabilize their lives easily without a place to call home.

As incentive to participate, legislators have created the Landlord Mitigation Program, which will make it much more attractive for landlords to rent to people with lower incomes and also addresses the landlords’ risks and concerns. Together, these two laws should make a big impact on homelessness. We will discuss this program fully in next week’s column.

First, here is some more information on RCW59.18.040, the law that advocates for low-income people.

This state law, which became effective Sept. 30, makes it illegal for landlords in Washington state to discriminate against tenants and potential tenants based on their source of income. Under this law, a landlord cannot:

• Refuse to rent to someone because of their source of income.

• Charge someone more rent than someone else because they receive some sort of public benefits.

• Tell a potential tenant that the unit is not available when it is.

• Advertise a property for rent only to tenants with certain types of income.

What’s all this about “source of income”? As we mentioned earlier, because of bad experiences in the past, many landlords were not eager to rent their properties to people on various forms of public assistance or benefits. This law addresses that bias, while the companion law advocates for the landlord, making it less risky to rent to someone who receives benefits.

To be clear, the “source of income” being addressed includes:

• Federal, state and local public benefits, such as Social Security, VA, retirement, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or Aged, Blind and Disabled benefits.

• Rent subsidies from federal, state or local housing programs, such as the Section 8 voucher program, Share Aspire, or Housing and Essential Needs.

• Short-term rental assistance — for example, from Catholic Community Services or Lutheran Community Services.

This new law also means that if someone is currently renting a place and their source of income changes so that they are now receiving public benefits, the landlord cannot end the lease or evict them simply because of that change. Nor can the landlord treat someone differently from any other tenant who does not get benefits.

This law applies to all landlords as defined by the state Residential Landlord Tenant Act. However, it does not apply in situations such as farm workers living in employer-provided housing; people getting housing in exchange for work; or people living in hotels or motels.

This isn’t to say this new law forces a landlord to rent to a certain person, Lentz said. “If they have a policy that they don’t rent to people with felony records, they can still keep that policy. The landlord just can’t discriminate because someone is receiving public assistance.”

Often landlords require people to have an income that is two or three times what the rent is. (In fact, that’s the rough estimate that we tell people they should be paying for their housing.)

However, with the new law, a landlord who uses the amount of a tenant’s household income in deciding whether to rent can only count the portion of rent this potential tenant would be paying out of their own pocket — not what is paid by something like a Section 8 voucher.

Dave Murnen and Pat Beaty are construction specialists at NeighborWorks of Grays Harbor County, where Murnen is executive director. This is a nonprofit organization committed to creating safe and affordable housing for all residents of Grays Harbor County. For questions about home repair, renting, remodeling or buying, call 360-533-7828 or visit 710 E. Market St. in Aberdeen. Our office is fully ADA-compliant.