McALLEN -- With no job, five young mouths to feed and an income earned by his wife that barely breaks $19,000 a year, Chris Valle still considers himself lucky.
He has a place his family can afford to call home.
But for more and more of the Rio Grande Valley’s low-income renters, the basic need is falling out of reach. According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau estimates, more than half of Hidalgo County’s renters spend more than one-third of their income on housing — the benchmark by which the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development determines affordability.
And while the region’s median income has continued to rise over the past decade, rents have risen apace, forcing many to sacrifice on other necessities like food, clothing, transportation and medical care. Meanwhile, government rental assistance — through programs such as public housing and Section 8 vouchers — has grown harder and harder to come by.
Now, a single-income, minimum-wage family of four paying the area’s average $655 monthly rent on a two-bedroom apartment spends nearly twice as much on housing as HUD says they should be able to afford.
“All of the programs that provide deeply subsidized housing have ceased production,” said Jack Cann of the Minnesota-based Housing Preservation Project, a nonprofit committed to protecting housing affordability. “There’s very little housing for lowincome people anymore.”
TIGHTENING THE BELT
Valle, 26, moved into his apartment at the McAllen Housing Authority’s Vine Terrace this spring. The public housing complex near the intersection of Vine Avenue and North 29th Street isn’t much to look at, but it’s adequate, safe and has ample space for his five children to play, he said.
On a good afternoon, his small four-bedroom apartment provides a place as good as any to lay out a spread of marinated chicken wings on the grill, sit back and watch his children run in the front yard.
But last year, the family rarely had time for such pleasures. Valle, who works as a migrant harvester, has struggled to find employment since the economy went south last fall. His former landlord threatened to raise his rent to $600 — nearly 40 percent of the monthly salary his wife brings home as a checkout clerk at Marshalls department store.
Not knowing where else to turn, the family got on the McAllen Housing Authority’s waiting list and eight months later was placed in a home.
The Valle clan faced a relatively short wait for housing assistance. But quick placement is not the norm at most of the region’s 24 housing authorities.
Across Hidalgo, Cameron and Starr counties, waiting lists for public housing and Section 8 vouchers — which provide government subsidies for rents in excess of 30 percent of income — have swelled in recent months to as long as two years.
To qualify, families must meet a complex set of criteria based on income, family size, and average market rents.
But unlike other indigency programs such as food stamps and Medicaid, housing assistance is not a federal entitlement. Only a fourth of eligible households receive it, according to a 2007 HUD report.
With limited space and vouchers to hand out, most of the Valley’s housing authorities have been forced to close off their waiting lists. Some still maintain lists more than twice as long as the numbers of vouchers they have available to give out, while others haven’t opened their lists to new applicants in years.
The La Joya Housing Authority maintains a waiting list of about 500 households — almost four times the number of vouchers it has available to give out at any given time.
In Mission, the waiting list swelled to nearly 2,000 households before the housing authority shut it down in summer 2008.
And at the Brownsville Housing Authority — the largest south housing authority of San Antonio — clerks haven’t accepted new applicants in two years and have no plans to do so until 2010. Their waiting list currently stands at 600 households for both public housing and Section 8 housing.
That wasn’t the case decades ago, said director Linda Mendez. During the late ’80s, the housing authority had more money than it knew what to do with, she said.
“Then, Congress started tightening the belt,” she said. “They might have overcorrected. Since then, it’s become a yo-yo — an administrative nightmare.”
So how has the situation deteriorated so quickly?
SHRINKING FUNDS
Because Congress is under no obligation to subsidize housing for all who need it, funding for HUD programs has always been something of a political football — subject to the whims and philosophies of those who control the U.S. House and Senate.
During the ’94 Republican Revolution, the fiscally conservative party shifted the emphasis of housing assistance spending away from large, government-run public housing complexes to private landlords — subsidizing local rents through tax credits and programs like Section 8. Funding was slashed even further as the party continued to control Congress.
But during the past several years, a collision of three factors has made the problem more acute across the country, housing experts say.
President George W. Bush and a compliant Congress diverted millions of dollars from housing and other domestic programs during the early 2000s to pay for tax breaks and foreign wars.
Meanwhile, a housing bubble inflated rental and home prices across the nation, tempting several landlords who accepted Section 8 reimbursements from the government to opt out of the program in hopes of attracting a fair-market rent.
Then, once that bubble crashed, hundreds of thousands who had lost jobs, homes, or significant sources of income suddenly found themselves eligible to file for housing benefits, while investors grew more and more hesitant to spend money on new low-rent apartment complexes even with the lure of tax breaks.
So while the supply of available housing had been shrinking for years, demand had suddenly gone up.
“If you look at virtually any community in the country, you’ll see that low-income people are paying more than their 30 percent or are living in sub-standard housing,” said Cann, the housing advocate. “There simply isn’t enough to go around.”
THE WAITING GAME
By now, Mike Lopez is used to turning people away.
As the director of the Hidalgo County Housing Authority, he never had to tell a qualified applicant no for very long until his department shut down its list last year — the first time in his 20 years with the agency.
He’s still looking for a place to house the 498 households still on his list.
“It’s kind of like a domino effect,” he said. “The demand is there. The supply of apartments is there. The money to pay for them is not.”
So for now, those like Fabiola Perez simply have to wait.
The 22-year-old dropped off her application for assistance last week at the Mercedes Housing Authority only to be told the wait could be as long as a year and a half.
With her parents going through a divorce, Perez still hadn’t figured out how she was going to move herself and her mother out of her father’s home on the meager income she makes as a saleswoman.
“It’s just my mom and me,” she said. “I’m the only one working. It doesn’t matter where we live.
“We just need a place as soon as possible.”
