Gasp. Horror! That’s right, yesterday, I made a mistake. One is bound to do that from time to time. The ghastly mistake I made yesterday was when I said that people who have “sticky Section 8” vouchers can’t move and take the subsidy with them and therefore are “trapped” in their housing. Turns out, they are only “trapped” for a year and then, and this is a really cool loophole, then they can move and they are first in line to get a new section 8 voucher. That means that if you can’t get on the section 8 waiting list or you’ve been there for a really long time, you should go to one of the agencies that have these “sticky Section 8” vouchers (YWCA, Housing Initiatives, Prochlight, Project Home, Moving Out) get into one of their apartments and after a year you can move on and get a section 8 voucher without having to wait. Cool.
Of course, with every mistake you make, you also get the opportunity to learn something new. In addition to learning about the cool loophole above, I also learned a couple other things. First of all the “sticky section 8” vouchers are really a conversion of some of the current 1350 vouchers we have from “tenant-based vouchers” to “project-based vouchers”. Those are the correct terms to be using. “Sticky section 8” means quite a few different things and is likely a wrong term to be using, but it is how it has been described by city staff to the community.
The other thing that I learned is that although the city/CDA staff told the community that 100% of the units would affordable due to these project-based section 8 units there is a catch. In order to have a project have more than 25% of the units be affordable, you have to have “services” that go with the project. I wonder what “services” the CDA is going to provide? In all the meetings I’ve been to, and I haven’t been to all of them, I haven’t heard them mention these services once.
Finally, check out this blog by one of the Allied Drive residents. Of particular interest to me is why she finds these community meetings useless to her. It’s a pretty good critique of the city’s/CDA’s community/planning process. Yup, just fine.
