Santa Clara County officials are bracing for more cuts to their housing voucher programs, which subsidizes rent for low-income individuals.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) informed the county that Emergency Housing Vouchers were expiring. This pandemic-era program, which began in 2021 through a $5 billion lump sum approved by Congress, was supposed to be funded until 2030. Instead, it appears funding will be cut short and end in 2026, according to a memo. A spokesperson for the Santa Clara County Housing Authority, which administers the vouchers, said HUD didn’t make it clear if the program ran out of money, or if it was an order from the Trump administration to terminate the program. The county has been receiving around $26 million a year for the vouchers.
“The Santa Clara County Housing Authority is working diligently with our partners to devise a plan and identify resources to ensure that residents who are assisted through the Emergency Housing Voucher program remain stably housed,” spokesperson Brandi Johnson told San José Spotlight.
Emergency housing vouchers are similar to Section-8 vouchers, but are specifically geared toward those facing homelessness or fleeing violent situations. People with these vouchers only pay 30% of their income for rent and the federal government subsidizes the rest. There are about 950 households in the county who use an emergency housing voucher, nearly half of which are families.
In addition to the potential sunsetting of the EHV program, the housing authority is bracing for a 10% cut to its other housing voucher programs next fiscal year, which could result in a potential loss of 2,000 additional vouchers. Officials said they won’t know how much will be cut until the start of the federal government’s fiscal year in October.
“There are levers that we can pull before the final one that would require us to end assistance to families. We surely hope we won’t get there,” Housing Authority Deputy Executive Director Angie Garcia-Nguyen said at the April 15 San Jose City Council meeting. “We’re revisiting all policies and changes we can make. We are fortunate that even though the forecast looks like doom and gloom, we are a financially healthy organization.”
The loss of these housing vouchers will put a dent in the county’s goal to curtail homelessness, particularly for families. In 2021, the county launched the “Heading Home” campaign to reach “functional zero” for homeless families by 2025— where more families are getting housed than becoming homeless. Since 2021, the county has helped more than 2,100 families obtain permanent housing.
However, the number of new households seeking homeless services is rapidly rising in Santa Clara County, with one in five being families with children, according to data provided by nonprofit Destination: Home. From 2022 to the end of 2023, there was a 24% increase of people becoming homeless for the first time, or about 4,300 new households.
There are nearly 10,000 homeless people in the county, according to a 2023 census, and for every one person that gets housed, nearly two fall into homelessness.
Sandy Perry, board vice president of South Bay Community Land Trust, said the federal cuts further expose a broken system meant to benefit the rich that makes affordable housing out of reach.
“The system thrives when property values go up, rents go up, and more people become unhoused,” Perry told San José Spotlight. “The only way to change that is to flood the market with affordable housing, which requires government subsidies. And it seems like the (San Jose) mayor, instead of rallying people to provide housing, he goes around organizing against affordable housing, saying it’s too expensive. That’s unconscionable.”
Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.