LOS ANGELES — Getting your hands on a Section 8 voucher can feel like winning the lottery if you’re homeless in Los Angeles County. After all, the wait list to receive a federal voucher has more than 30,000 people on it. But a voucher is no guarantee you’ll find a landlord to accept it.
In fact, more than 9,000 housing vouchers went unused last year, according to the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, or HACLA.
Meanwhile, thousands of voucher holders like April Hurd remain sleeping on the streets.
“I feel like I should have been off these streets a long time ago,” Hurd said outside her broken-down van in Westchester. “It should never have gotten to this point.”
Good Samaritans have already given Hurd household items in anticipation of the voucher-holder landing an apartment. For the past four years, Hurd and her dog, Sassy Girl, have slept in a van loaded with food and supplies. The senior said she left her previous Section 8 apartment because of mold and a pest infestation and then struggled to get a new voucher and now, an apartment.
“It’s been hard. I face challenges every day. People threatening my life — literally threatening my life,” Hurd said.
For every empty apartment, voucher holders like Hurd compete with an average of 20 applicants, many of whom don’t require any red tape to move in, according to HACLA’s Director of Section 8 Housing Carlos Van Natter.
“The demand is so incredible and we just don’t have the housing or resources,” Van Natter said.
The backlog has city leaders looking to Europe for solutions. Earlier this year, Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez was part of a delegation that studied social housing in Vienna, Austria, where more than half a million residents live in housing built and owned by the government.
“There isn’t a fight for housing,” Hernandez said. “Right now, if we were to offer some sort of housing, what we have is hotels. We don’t have landlords who are ready and willing to take Section 8 vouchers.”
In April, Hernandez co-authored a resolution calling on Los Angeles to pursue social housing as a model to address housing affordability and homelessness. Hernandez said Vienna builds 10,000 new public housing units a year. Compare that to LA’s $1.2 billion homeless housing bond that aims to build the same number in a decade.
Hernandez said she’s optimistic Measure ULA, a new tax on property sales over $5 million, will provide a new revenue stream to build affordable housing.
Meanwhile, she said market rate developments to not address the affordability crisis that displaces residents in historically low-income neighborhoods.
“So many people are struggling to stay housed,” Hernandez said.
Even as Los Angeles scales up efforts to build affordable housing, the lack of inventory will persist. Vienna has been building social housing for nearly a century.
“Then we run into the problem of where do we put the housing?” Van Natter said. “Is there enough space in the City of Los Angeles? It’s going to require more density.”
Meanwhile, on the street, Hurd placed a note on her car pleading with police not to tow her possessions while she seeks permanent housing.
“I never thought I would go through this. Especially this long. I’ve been doing everything I’m supposed to do.”
She’s got big plans to rebuild her life once she and sassy girl have a safe place to call home.