Columbia and Boone County residents who need help with housing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic have new opportunities for help after the Columbia City Council provided more than $300,000 to two organizations offering assistance.
Columbia Housing Authority Low-Income Services and the Voluntary Action Center were two organizations that received money after a third round of funding the city received for pandemic relief through a Community Development Block Grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The Voluntary Action Center received $230,000 to provide rental assistance. The organization will use the money city to assist 60 households and 150 people, according to a memo to the City Council.
People in need of rental assistance will receive money from the Voluntary Action Center if the need resulted from COVID-19, Executive Director Ed Stansberry said Wednesday.
“So either you’ve lost your job due to COVID, your hours have been reduced due to COVID, your child couldn’t go into child care because of COVID,” Stansberry said.
Once a person has made it past the screening process and filled out an application, the center will work to catch that family up on their rent.
“The maximum amount of months that we can provide service is six months, but it’s basically a first-come, first-served, type of arrangement,” Stansberry said.
The city previously gave the Voluntary Action Center $270,000 from its first round of Community Development Block Grant pandemic relief to provide rent assistance for low-income residents of Boone County.
Stansberry offered a breakdown of the income levels of households who were helped with the first round of money:
- 61% were at 0% to 30% of the area’s median income.
- 35% were at 31% to 50% of the area’s median income.
- 4% were at 50% to 81% of the area’s median income.
While all the people who received money were low-income, that was not a requirement.
“Where upper-income people might be able to weather a storm and wouldn’t be asking for this kind of assistance,” Stansberry said, “the lower-income folks don’t have that luxury.”
Meanwhile, the Columbia Housing Authority Low-Income Service received $77,588 from the City Council to hire a housing ambassador. The ambassador will provide support to a minimum of 10 households per month, or 120 households per year, according to another memo to the council.
“Our Housing Choice Voucher program, or Section 8 program, works with renters in very low-income households that need housing stability and rental properties in our community,” Randy Cole, CEO of the Columbia Housing Authority, said Friday.
Cole said the housing market has been hot for the past few years. He said homes are selling as fast as they go on the market, and there’s a similar dynamic for rental properties.
“Once we issue a voucher to lower-income households, they’re really struggling to find available rental properties, and it’s just really competitive,” Cole said.
Cole said the specialists who determine if someone is eligible for a voucher are working with 300 households each.
“So they, they don’t really have the capacity or time to really provide an intense level of assistance to the people we serve,” Cole said.
The money from the city allows the authority to hire an ambassador who will be dedicated to connecting prospective residents with available properties.
Cole said Columbia needs to supply more affordable housing.
“Our community definitely needs to find ways to help increase our supply of affordable housing,” Cole said.
Jane Williams, executive director of Love Columbia, said they are trying to find and create more housing that will accept the vouchers.
“There aren’t enough rental properties available or enough local landlords that will accept the vouchers,” Williams said.
Altogether, the City Council distributed $1.3 million to eight organizations from its reserves to help low-income residents of Columbia with a variety of needs and services. All the requests from organizations that submitted proposals for the money were approved. The grants include:
- $54,000 for the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture to grow and distribute food to low-income residents.
- $200,000 to Love Columbia to acquire property for a home that will be used as transitional shelter for families with children experiencing homelessness.
- $150,000 to Job Point for vocational training. The organization estimates it will provide 33 scholarships for job training.
- $12,000 to Turning Point/Wilkes Boulevard United Methodist Church to support technology, equipment and space modifications to the homeless day center hosted by the church.
- $20,500 to Rock the Community for vocational training activities for 200 people.
- $94,709 to the Salvation Army to support the expansion of an emergency and transitional shelter for the homeless.
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June 29, 2021 at 05:45AM
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