Housing Authority OKs hotel, motel voucher for sheltering of homeless

The county’s Housing Authority approved the use of $100,000 of its Housing Choice Voucher Ad­ministrative Fee Reserve revenue to provide temporary housing for homeless individuals and families in the unincorporated county dur­ing weather events, which can be life threatening to unsheltered citi­zens.

The board of the San Diego County Housing Authority consists of the five members of the San Di­ego County Board of Supervisors and two tenants.

The Housing Authority voted 7-0 January 27 to provide the fund­ing the county intends to use for a hotel/motel voucher program.

“We want to come up with cre­ative ideas,” Supervisor Dave Roberts said.

“I think this is a step in the right direction,” he added.

The area’s Regional Task Force on the Homeless conducts periodic point-in-time counts on an early morning to determine the total number of homeless in the region.

The 2015 point-in-time count de­termined 4,156 unsheltered men, women, and children throughout the region including 214 individu­als in the unincorporated area of the county.

“These men and women are es­pecially vulnerable to the weather and natural disasters, so we pledged $100,000 in Federal housing funds towards vouchers that will allow the homeless of North and East County to find temporary shelter during es­pecially dangerous weather,” Super­visor Bill Horn said.

The El Niño weather predictions may expose unsheltered individuals and families to hypothermia, frost­bite, or other life-threatening condi­tions caused by weather.

The county and other partner agencies have been developing a regional coordinated response to provide temporary housing for the unsheltered during dangerous weather.

The county and each of the 18 incorporated cities in San Diego County will have opportunities to provide resources within their re­spective jurisdictions.

The county’s Department of Hous­ing and Community Development plans to create a hotel/motel voucher program to provide temporary shel­ter on an as-needed basis and work with a non-profit service provider, which would administer the pro­gram.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development provides Housing Choice Voucher Adminis­trative Fee funding to local govern­ments.

Although the Federal Fiscal Year 2004 Appropriations Act restricted that funding to the Housing Choice Voucher program, more commonly known as Section 8, Housing Choice Voucher Administrative Fee funding provided prior to that legislation can be used for any legal housing pur­pose.

So the use of pre-2004 reserves for a temporary shelter program for the homeless is in compliance with the Federal conditions.