Workshop: San Marcos Housing Authority
You might have heard about a giant clusterfuck with vouchers and waitlists, back in September? This workshop is that. Council is attempting to figure out what the hell happened.
Background
SMHA is funded by the Housing and Urban Development Agency. (HUD). So it runs on federal dollars and doesn’t have any formal partnership with the city.
SMHA owns about 200 properties, at these sites:
as well as some individual rental houses around town. In addition, they have 251 Section 8 vouchers. This means that SMHA subsidizes your rent, so that you’re only paying according to your income.
To be eligible for a Section 8 voucher, you must earn under 30% of the median income for our region:
The median income in San Marcos is $47K/year and the poverty rate is 27%, so I’m going to ballpark that there are about 19,000 people in San Marcos who would qualify for housing assistance.
Anyway! We’ve got 451 apartments and vouchers total, to spread out over those 19,000 people. What could go wrong?
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Naturally, there’s a super long waitlist. Once you get a voucher or an apartment, you can keep it as long as you qualify. So the waitlist moves very, very slowly.
None of this is SMHA’s fault so far. It’s basically the fault of voters and federal elected officials, who don’t properly fund HUD.
SMHA has an internal policy that everyone on the waitlist should get a voucher within 12-18 months. So they cap the waitlist. It’s very rare that they open up the waitlist and let people on.
The last time they opened up the waitlist was in 2016. They had 500 pre-applicants join the waitlist. That was too many – it took 8 years to whittle it down. Over that time, half the people dropped off the waitlist. There are still 30 people remaining, from that 2016 batch.
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Ok, we’re getting to the September mess now.
So back in September, they finally decided to open up the waitlist. They ran this notice in the newspaper:
Nothing in that posting is faulty or misleading. But listen: it is so, so hard to get clear messages out to the public. This is not that.
Here’s how it was supposed to work:
- Between Sept 9th and Sept 22nd, 250 people stop by and pick up a pre-application.
- On Sept 14th, all 250 people drop off their completed pre-application, between 8:30 am-5 pm.
- Those 250 people are now on the waitlist.
That’s just not a realistic plan, when it comes to guiding actual people? Organizing people to follow a game plan is really difficult! People are not good at paying attention and following detailed rules. You have to build a lot of redundancy and safeguards into systems.
Here’s what happened:
- 250 people did successfully pick up a pre-application.
- Tons of people showed up on September 14th. They were hoping for actual vouchers. Chaos reigned and the rumor mill picked it up. People were sent away. People were incredibly frustrated and heartbroken. There was an air of chaos and disorganization.
- In the end, about 180 of those original 250 got on the waitlist.
Listen: The biggest failure is having 451 subsidized housing units for 19,000 people who qualify. When you have that kind of massive scarcity, every mistake that follows takes on epic proportions. So yes, their roll-out had lots of problems, but it’s magnified because of the huge need.
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What is Council’s take on all this?
Council takes three basic approaches:
- What the hell?! How was this so poorly planned? [Jane Hughson]
- Gingerly asking, “Is there any way we can help? Are there major obstacles that are preventing SMHA from running smoothly?” [Alyssa, Amanda]
- There are a lot of broken elevators, broken cameras, and generally crappy living conditions in these apartments [Saul]
What the hell?! How was this so poorly planned?
Jane just cannot get over the fact that they intended to accept 250 people onto the waitlist, but then required a drop-off between 8:30-5 pm on a single Wednesday. “Why not open it up all week? You controlled the number of pre-applications that were out there! You knew for sure that you wouldn’t go over 250.”
There’s not really a good answer, no many how times Jane tries. (And she tries.)
- Many towns in Texas only open their waitlist for a day.
- By 3 pm, they weren’t getting people anymore.
- You could also fax it in! You don’t have to come in, in person!
All of these just make Council’s head spin.
- “But what if someone works? Or has childcare issues?”
- “Who the hell has a fax machine in 2024?! Why can’t they email their pre-application paperwork in?”
- When they ended with only 180 applications, why didn’t they give out more pre-applications to get up to 250?
Ultimately, there are not any satisfying answers. A lot of these are SMHA policy, and the speakers don’t have the power to change the policy. Only the SMHA board can change the policy.
They do plan to do things differently next time:
- Give away preapplications to all
- Allow online preapplications
- Select people for the waitlist by lottery.
Again: Yes, the roll-out was poorly done. But the scarcity is the real problem. If we had 19,000 low-income housing options for 19,000 people, then this would be a hassle, but not a catastrophe. But 451 housing units is just crumbs.
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“Is there any way we can help? Are there major obstacles that are preventing SMHA from running smoothly?”
Alyssa and Amanda ask variations on this several times, but never get a clear answer.
They also ask:
- What’s the best way for community feedback?
- What is the best way for Council and SMHA to partner? Whose lane is whose?
None of these have particularly good answers. Alyssa encourages them to put email and phone numbers on their website.
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“There are a lot of broken elevators, broken cameras, and generally crappy living conditions in these apartments”
They have four maintenance workers for the public housing units. They try to do all repairs on vacant apartments within 30 days.
Like with everything else, they’re underfunded and understaffed. (That’s my language, not theirs. They most repeat their policies.)
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Going forward, the plan is to have a joint meeting between City Council and the SMHA Board, probably in February, to iron all this out.
So there is more to come! Stay tuned.
The San Marxist 