DIRE WAIT: Affordable housing in the Keene area is hard to find and sometimes difficult to keep
As published on page one of the February 19, 2011 edition of The Keene Sentinel, and online.
Asked how she imagined her retirement, Janet LaBelle laughed.
"On a beach, with a pool boy fanning me," she said, before turning more serious. She thought she might travel and see more of the country, take some time for art, and volunteer at the hospital, she said.
Things aren't working out as planned.
LaBelle has seen her income drop and her expenses skyrocket in recent years due to a series of medical crises. On top of illnesses and financial difficulties, she can't find an affordable place to live, part of a chronic problem in the Keene area.
Home rentals in non-metropolitan areas of New Hampshire are the fifth- most expensive of any state in the country, behind Massachusetts, Hawaii, Alaska and Connecticut, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group. If you include cities, New Hampshire is the 10th-most expensive state for renters.
LaBelle, 66, spent her career working in health care and for social service agencies, first as an administrator and later as a psychiatric crisis worker, after earning bachelor's and master's degrees through the adult degree program at Norwich University's Brattleboro campus. She also raised four children.
"It was going reasonably well," she said. "I had planned to work for a few more years; there was retirement in the future but I didn't have a target date, per se."
But then, in 2008, she got sick. First with cancer, then pneumonia and methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, better known as MRSA, a particularly virulent bacterial infection.
What was initially a six-week medical leave extended for months. And all that time in bed caused additional problems -- anemia, arthritis and back pain. When her employer told her she had to either return to work or be removed from the payroll, LaBelle said, she didn't see many options.
"The work that I did required a lot of walking and a lot of mobility and I just knew I wouldn't be able to do it," she recalled.
When the paychecks stopped coming, LaBelle turned to Social Security and long-term disability insurance. She knew she needed additional help to keep a roof over her head, but help proved surprisingly hard to find.
"It's okay if you can plan ahead, and say 'I'm going to have my emergency in three years,' " she said. "But emergency housing was not available. Every place I called, it was the same thing -- they all have waiting lists."
The waiting list
In Keene, every federally funded public housing program has a wait list measured in years. For the Section 8 voucher program, which would have allowed LaBelle to stay in the apartment she was living in when she got sick, the N.H. Housing Finance Authority estimates a wait of between six and eight years. In Keene, people who have recently come off the waiting list have been waiting for four years, according to P. Curtis Hiebert, executive director of the Keene Housing Authority, which runs federal housing programs in Keene and surrounding towns.
"I thought, they'll come down, they can subsidize my apartment -- I'm already here. But that's when they said a seven-year waiting list," LaBelle said.
With the help of a fuel voucher from Southwestern Community Services and rental support from the city's welfare office, LaBelle made partial rent payments on her $900-a-month apartment while she looked for a job that she could do from home to accommodate her limited mobility. The landlords worked with her for many months, but eventually took legal action.
At the end of last year LaBelle was evicted from the apartment she had lived in for a decade. She owed more than $9,000 in back rent.
Difficulty for renters
"There's not that many places to turn to if you're having trouble making rent," said Jane N. Law, director of communications at the N.H. Housing Finance Authority.
The economic downturn contributed to the difficulties faced by those who, like LaBelle, fall victim to circumstance.
In the wake of the national financial crisis, homeowners got a lot of help from the federal government, but renters got no such assistance, according to Law.
At the same time, people who lost their houses moved into the rental market.
"The price of homes has dropped, but rents have not gone down," Law said.
The Housing Choice Voucher, commonly referred to as "Section 8," is a federal program that helps people with low incomes pay their rent. Recipients can live anywhere the landlord is willing to accept payment through the program, and the government subsidizes the difference between the area's fair market rent (calculated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development) and approximately 30 percent of the recipient's income.
The number of vouchers is limited, but once a person or family is in the program there is no time limit on how long they can stay, according to Law. A voucher guarantees help with housing as long as the recipient's annual income stays below the limit for that voucher.
In 2010, a family of four in Keene was classified as Low Income if its income was less than $55,300, Very Low Income if its income was less than $34,550, and Extremely Low Income if its income was less than $20,750. For a single person, the cutoff for Low Income was $38,750, Very Low Income was $24,200 and Extremely Low Income was $14,550.
"Any disabled or elderly person, they may very well be on that voucher for a very long time because they have a very fixed income," Law said.
There are more than 700 families and individuals in Keene on waiting lists for housing vouchers or subsidized housing, according to Hiebert.
"Some of them are homeless, some are living with friends or family, some are paying 70 or 80 percent of their income to rent," he said. "And when you're paying that much of your income to rent, your other options are limited."
While the economic downturn has made the problem worse, there has never been a time in his 23 years at the agency when the supply of subsidized housing has met demand, Hiebert said.
Keene Housing Authority has 447 subsidized units available and 293 vouchers that people can use with independent landlords. The wait for a three-bedroom unit can be as short as a year, Hiebert said, but the list is much longer for the one-bedroom apartments suitable for most disabled and elderly residents.
In 2009, two-thirds of the people on waiting lists in Keene fell into one of those two categories.
Living out of suitcases
LaBelle was able to move in with her 43-year-old son, Michael Porter. Porter is autistic and himself living with the help of a Section 8 voucher, in an apartment he has occupied for 17 years.
"I wanted him to be independent, that was my intention as he was growing up autistic -- that he not have to live with me the rest of his life," LaBelle said.
The apartment wasn't intended for two people.
"The things that I've had in my home for years are now in boxes in storage," LaBelle said. "I feel kind of displaced because I'm basically living out of a couple of suitcases."
But searching for housing outside of the subsidized system has proved difficult as well.
LaBelle applied for a discounted one-bedroom unit advertised by Southwestern Community Services. She says she could afford the $600-per-month rent, but after a bad credit reference from her previous landlords, her application was denied.
"We try not to set people up to fail," said Keith Thibault, the agency's chief development officer. He said he could not comment specifically on LaBelle's application.
Unlike the housing authority, which is supported by federal subsidies, Southwestern's units are not subsidized, Thibault said. He characterized Southwestern's housing as the "next stage" after the housing authority's services.
Southwestern's apartments are available to people with incomes at or below 60 percent of the area's median income. In Cheshire County, that means a maximum income for a single person of $29,040 per year, or $41,460 per year for a family of four. In addition to the income requirements, the agency conducts credit checks, landlord checks and criminal background checks, according to Thibault.
"You must have the income in order to pay the rent," he said.
The lack of affordable housing options extends to this level as well.
In Keene, units that become available are rented in the time it takes to clean them out for the new tenants, Thibault said.
"There's a tremendous demand for affordable housing. For those who have very little and up to a moderate income, there just isn't a big supply," he said.
The demand for college housing, while not necessarily a bad thing in itself, exacerbates the problem in Keene, according to Thibault.
"A lot of what might be affordable housing to a working family gets eaten up and occupied by college students," he said.
A drop in the bucket
Southwestern Community Services expects to make 24 new apartments available in Keene this summer or fall in its CitySide housing. They will be available to people of any age who are not college students, but the effect of 24 units on the demand will be so small as to not be measurable, Thibault said.
Since 2007, Southwestern Community Services has been responsible for the addition of 64 units of workforce housing and 95 units of housing for the elderly, Thibault said. This includes 57 units now operated by the Keene Housing Authority at Stone Arch Village.
The biggest impediment to housing construction is a lack of infrastructure, according to Thibault.
"You really need water and sewer to be able to build affordably, and a limited number of towns in this area have that infrastructure," he said.
Another way that towns can help increase affordable housing is by choosing spots to change zoning laws and allow denser development, he said. For example, the town of Dublin decided last year to waive certain zoning regulations and allow construction of twice as many houses per lot, he said.
A state law that came into effect on Jan. 1, 2010, intended to make it harder for towns to turn away developers who want to build affordable workforce housing.
Availability of federally funded resources like the Section 8 voucher are dependent on decisions made in Washington, D.C.
But the Keene Housing Authority is working on freeing up what is available. It has a program to help those who are physically able to work strike out on their own, with job skills training and help looking for work.
In the past two years, 20 percent of residents have moved out of the subsidized housing program, according to Hiebert. Of those, 10 percent went on to own their own home, he said.
LaBelle hopes that she can use her experience to help other people in a situation similar to her own. She has started a Facebook group called "Not On The Streets," and hopes to offer support and advocacy for anyone who loses his or her home because of illness or age.
"There are many other people that are going through this, and this isn't just about me," she said.
Support from her friends and family have been her key to getting through this trying time, LaBelle said.
"They're exploring and looking for things that will help, and they're encouraging me to do what I'm trying to do," she said. "Everybody in their own way has done something, whether it's calling the (state) senator or writing a letter or helping me pack or letting me stay, everyone has just gone way out of their way. I couldn't have done it without all of that."
In addition to waiting lists, LaBelle is looking independently for housing she can afford, and she said she hopes to move out of her son's apartment and into her own place this spring.
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