The Long Beach City Council voted unanimously in favor of looking at options to entice landlords to accept the hundreds of homeless people in the city who have housing vouchers that could pay for a significant portion of their rent.
Long Beach saw a 62% increase in the number of people experiencing homelessness since 2020, with about 700 more people living unsheltered, according to the most recent count in February.
However, health department officials say that over 400 of those people have Section 8 housing vouchers that pay up to 70% of their monthly rents, and sometimes all of it.
Councilmember Stacy Mungo Flanigan said one problem has been finding willing landlords to accept the vouchers. Her proposal asked for incentives ranging from refunded development permit fees and subsidies from other city departments be considered.
City officials said that if every person with a housing voucher was connected with a landlord, it could reduce the city’s unhoused population by about 20%.
Mungo Flanigan said Tuesday that if the city offered some kind of benefit to property owners to install dedicated meters for new accessory dwelling units or on multi-unit apartment buildings, it could help save tenants money because they would only pay for the water or gas that they personally use, and it could help city utilities better understand how people are using resources.
“It’s difficult to incentivize conservation when you have a dozen people on a meter or even three to four on a meter,” Mungo Flanigan said.
Lauren Gold, a spokesperson for the Long Beach Water Department, said meters cost about $1,500 and are not required to be installed for ADU. However, installing individual meters for each unit in an apartment is a much more complicated task and the department didn’t have an estimated cost for that procedure.
Gold said the department is looking at how it could help with Mungo Flanigan’s proposal, but it may be limited by California laws guiding how utilities set prices. Proposition 218 has specific requirements for utility providers when setting rates and generally limit rates to the cost of service, which includes the installation of new lines and meters.
The proposal would extend to all landlords, including traditional homes, apartments and ADUs, which have become more popular in recent years.
Rick de La Torre, a spokesperson for the city’s Development Services Department, said Long Beach has seen 260 ADUs permitted so far this year and the city is on track to meet its goal in the city’s recently adopted Housing Element.
The Housing Element projected that ADU construction in the city would increase from about 300 annually to 500 annually, and could remain that high for a few years.
The council supported the idea of working to ensure more people in Long Beach seeking housing are connected to it. Councilmember Suzie Price, who is holding a workshop next month for landlords to try and “correct some of the misconceptions” of Section 8 vouchers, backed the motion.
“I think it’s really important for us to think of where our affordable housing options lie in the city and make existing housing stock more affordable,” Price said.
Members of the public supported the move, but also asked the city to look at other limitations of the city’s program that dictates how many people can live in a home and the rent levels established under the city’s program.
Housing voucher values are based on the ZIP code of the unit being rented and the number of bedrooms it has. However, one speaker questioned if the rates set are driving away property owners because they may not be what they can get on the open market from other renters.
City health officials that are leading the effort to help connect those experiencing homelessness with services, including housing, have said that the recent addition of Project Homekey and Roomkey, state and local programs that used motels to provide housing, were beneficial to getting people off the streets.
The motel rooms provide a more private shelter setting and that’s something that people prefer over congregate living situations provided by other city shelters. However, Project Roomkey is starting to be phased out.
Long Beach has been looking to buy another motel property to use as a homeless shelter over the past few months. The council’s last closed session meeting, which was canceled, had nine hotel properties listed as parties the city was negotiating with to purchase their properties.
https://staging-live.lbpost.com/news/homelessness-increased-by-62-in-long-beach-since-2020-according-to-city-data