The front page of Monday’s Virginian Pilot carried an article on the lack of affordable housing in the region, focusing specifically on Section 8. The graph at the left (click to enlarge) shows part of the problem but what got me was this:
Both Norfolk and Portsmouth are authorized to give out far more vouchers than they actually do – in Norfolk’s case, there’s funding for at least several hundred more families – but there isn’t enough housing to go around. Vouchers are handed out a few dozen at a time, and potential renters can spend years on waiting lists before getting the opportunity for assistance.
As Norfolk has upgraded its housing stock, left behind are those who can’t afford the price tag. What is even more worrisome is that the landlords, even when having some property available, don’t like to rent to Section 8 tenants.
Some states prohibit landlords from refusing the federal vouchers, but in Virginia, landlords can refuse to rent to people in the Section 8 program.
[…]”It’s a stereotype. I guess they fear we’re going to come in and destroy their property.”
A half-dozen landlords who don’t take Section 8 did not return calls or refused to speak on the record about why they don’t accept the vouchers.
I can understand that the landlords don’t want their property destroyed. But every group has a few bad apples and renting to a non-Section 8 tenant is no guarantee that the property will be well-maintained.
The article points out some efforts on the part of Norfolk and Portsmouth to attract more landlords to the program. I applaud them for this but they have to do more. And by doing more, I mean they shouldn’t be eliminating 40 low-income apartments from the pool.
As citizens of the city, we should all be concerned with the ability of our residents to live here. We’ve got to find a workable solution to the problem.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
The first question is whether the property destruction issue is fact or fiction. Landlords are businessmen. If there is clear and convincing evidence that Section 8 renters are no more likely to damage property, landlords will change their behavior. If Section 8 renters are more likely to damage property, then the landlords should be compensated accordingly.
Another issue is, of course, zoning laws. There are restrictions on how many unrelated people can live in a house (and how close those relations must be to be considered “related”). So a retired couple who own a house cannot (legally) rent an apartment and rent out their house to two or three low-income families. Nor can a landlord buy it from the couple and rent it to two or three low-income families.
The government is the problem here. One cannot expect them to be able to solve it.
There’s a simple lesson to learn from our nation’s current economic woes: leadership matters. You can be proactive about addressing a developing problem before it gets out of hand–like rising energy prices–or you can ignore the problem until it develops into a large enough crisis to destroy the status quo. Either way, the problems get solved, the only question is whether or not it’s going to take a recession to implement a solution.
I agree that government is part of the problem viz. zoning laws, but developers don’t want to make less profit off low-income housing projects than they think they would make building 100 more luxury condos. And the inescapable truth of our community is that we need housing for the folks who wash plates in our restaurants’ dish pits just as badly as we need housing for the folks in the dining room paying for dinner with their disposable income. I hope we see some leadership out of our local government before a local housing shortage develops into a local housing crisis.
Cities don’t zone for town homes because they don’t make any money from small homes. The city has to provide a water and sewage to each home. The cost of that construction and service is not covered by the taxes collected on low income housing. The cities want big homes for big tax revenues.