Bad credit. An eviction. Previous trouble with the law.
Those are some of the reasons that landlords typically refuse to rent an apartment and the main ones that keep homeless people from getting housing in the private market, even if they have resources.
A new King County program promises to change that by finding landlords who are willing to overlook past mistakes. It's called the Landlord Liaison Project, and so far it's gotten apartments for three people who were homeless.
Launched in January by Seattle's YWCA, the project asks landlords to agree to ease rental requirements for the chronically homeless, providing a deposit and some rent assistance for homeless people if they meet two criteria: They must be enrolled in a case management program that will follow them at least two years and have a long-term way to pay their rent through wages, public benefits or a federal housing voucher.
Developed by the county's Committee to End Homelessness and tried out in a six-month pilot on the Eastside, the project acts as a private housing broker for homeless service agencies, says Linda Rasmussen, the YWCA's director of homeless initiatives. It recruits and signs up the landlords, locates available units for people referred by the service agencies, and works to resolve any problems. If one arises, the landlord can either call the tenant's case manager or the project's 24-hour phone number.
To convince landlords to take the risk, the project makes tenants take renter responsibility training and even provides an "insurance" of sorts: King County's two-year, $2.2 million contract, which includes funding from the city of Seattle and United Way, sets aside $500,000 in mitigation funds to cover excessive damage that tenants might do to carpet, floors and walls, up to certain limits.
The mitigation fund allows landlords to claim a small amount of legal fees, which, in theory, could be used for the cost of evicting a tenant. But Rasmussen says her three housing specialists would find the person another unit well before an eviction.
What the project asks landlords is "Would you please take a chance for someone you'd normally screen out, because we'll be right there helping them?" she says of the basic premise, which is drawing landlords in greater numbers than anyone anticipated.
That's in part because the economy has left many rentals empty and the project can fill them quickly, Rasmussen says, saving landlords the cost of advertising.
So far, she says, 40 landlords and 22 service agencies have signed up. Rasmussen says most of the landlords are in south King County, where she speculates they are more familiar with federal rental vouchers than in north Seattle, where she says few have stepped up.
The project's goal is to find housing for 150 people by year's end. But the trick, she says, is that the homeless have to come with their own long-term rental subsidy through the program that refers them. Otherwise, there's no use moving them in, she says; it would be a set-up for failure after the tenant uses up the project's short-term rental assistance.
The project helped Carlton Mitchell, an Army veteran who's had two bouts of homelessness in the past two years, get a one-bedroom apartment this week. Most of his rent will be paid by a federal shelter-plus-care housing voucher he got through the REACH program of Seattle's Evergreen Treatment Service, which recently helped him sign up for state benefits.
"I'm so thrilled that I could bust open right now," Mitchell said before going to pick up the keys. Unlike the shelter he's been staying at the past two months, he'll have privacy and can come and go when he pleases. "I can have anyone in the house," he said. "If I don't want them there, I can tell them to leave."
Being able to get an apartment quickly is huge, says Mike Kabisch, Mitchell's case manager, because few landlords take housing vouchers. "If you have a product and can't get it to people, it doesn't do any good," Kabisch says of vouchers. The Landlord Liaison Project "helps connect the dots ... I'll be able to house so many more people this way."
One of the discoveries of the Eastside pilot, which started in May, is that it's the scarcity of rental vouchers, not landlords, that limits how many people can be housed, says Ann Levine, a housing advocate who set up the pilot and is now executive director of St. Andrew's Housing Group, a nonprofit housing provider in Issaquah.
The four agencies in the pilot, which was funded by two United Way grants and placed about 10 people, found that, with a little education, it wasn't difficult to recruit landlords, Levine says.
"We went in thinking we had clients with rental subsidies, but we didn't have landlords who would accept them," she says. But "we actually experienced a swing. We had landlords willing to take clients and in fact many of them eager to participate... but we suddenly reached a point where we needed rental assistance."
"Suddenly the whole idea of partnership with landlords was not a problem any more," she says. "It bodes really well for the King County project" -- if more long-term rental subsidy can be found, a problem that the YWCA's Rasmussen says she and her team will be looking at for the future.
In the meantime, Levine says, it's a solution that works by making use of the private market instead of developing new units. "If we're really going to end homelessness," she says, "we have to take advantage of the units that already exist in our community rather than building our way out of it." n