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Pandemic Increased Funding For Phoenix Rapid Rehousing Programs, But Landlords Are Needed
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Carlann Friday
Carlann Friday was homeless before she found an apartment through UMOM's rapid rehousing program.
A few years ago, Carlann Friday was in an accident. She broke her leg and ended up in a wheelchair for months. Since she couldn't stand, she couldn’t work as a hairdresser. Eventually, she and her two small children ended up homeless.
“We went from living in the back of my Cadillac to living on my neighbor’s back porch," Friday said.
A turning point for Friday and her kids came through a rapid rehousing program. Rather than keeping families and individuals in a homeless shelter, rapid rehousing programs prioritize getting people into their own homes by subsidizing their rent for several months. Meanwhile, a case manager helps the renter with job applications, or health services, or whatever other hurdles they might need to clear to be able to start paying their rent on their own.
“It just feels like it’s this huge weight lifted off of my shoulders," Friday said.
Friday got back to work as a hairdresser, though the pandemic put her out of work again. But her case manager is helping her stay housed so she doesn’t become homeless again.
UMOM, the nonprofit that helped Friday, is reporting a big increase on waitlists for services since the start of the pandemic. But COVID-19 has also created a funding opportunity for housing services in Phoenix. In April, the Phoenix City Council voted to make the single biggest one-time investment it’s ever made in these programs. The CARES Act allowed the city to secure $27 million in federal funding to fight homelessness.
Phoenix’s human services director Marchelle Franklin said rapid rehousing is just one of several housing solutions the city will spend that money on, but from the city’s perspective, she said it’s a good investment.
UMOM
Daniel Davis is director of housing for UMOM.
“Your goal at the end of the day is to always ensure that you're creating spaces for them to be successful because you don’t want them to go back to being homeless," Franklin said.
That funding for rapid rehousing will go to Central Arizona Shelter Services and UMOM.
“We need to house 535 households by the end of November, and that is going to be a massive undertaking," said Daniel Davis, UMOM’s director of housing.
Davis said that counts all the families UMOM had planned to help this year, plus hundreds more families and single women the city provided CARES Act funding for.
The organization hired 14 new staffers to help administer the program, and Davis said UMOM has already started housing families. But, he said, there’s one major roadblock.
“We have such a massive influx of funding and services we need to provide and we just don’t have enough landlord partners right now," Davis said.
Because rapid rehousing is about getting families into their own apartments–not shelters–it’s not something organizations can do on their own. Having hundreds of people to house means they need to locate hundreds of rental units. But the rental market in Phoenix is extremely tight. Even as the economy slips into a recession, real estate analytics site RealPage notes Phoenix is still seeing the biggest rent growth in the country and higher than 95 percent rental occupancy rates.
Marsha Thomason
Marsha Thomason is a landlord who has worked with rapid rehousing programs.
“The affordable housing crisis in Maricopa County disproportionately impacts families because there just aren’t a lot of affordable 3- or 4-bedroom units throughout the county," Davis said.
And some landlords can have reservations about working with rapid rehousing programs. Marsha Thomason is a landlord who has had eight rapid rehousing tenants in her building over the past two years. She said sometimes those renters might have minor criminal offenses in their past, or they might have had past evictions.
“You have to be able to forgive that and give them a second chance," Thomason said.
But Thomason said, unlike most renters, her tenants who came to her through housing nonprofits have case managers who help out if any issues arise. And she said working with rapid rehousing has helped keep her vacancy rate low and her building profitable.
Plus Thomason said, she gets to see renters’ lives change.
“One of the families bought their first home this year. One of the families that’s still there, they bought their first car," Thomason said.
Research suggests rapid rehousing programs are effective. The National Alliance to End Homelessness used UMOM’s program as a case study in 2016 and found it had a 93 percent success rate. Davis said only a small minority of participants become homeless again.
“It’s really an incredible and effective intervention and it’s much cheaper than running an emergency shelter," Davis said.
Everything still hinges on landlord participation, but Davis said if it’s successful, this is a rare opportunity to turn one-time funding from the pandemic into a long-term solution for hundreds of families.
