The Director of the Office of Housing Stability, Ellen Shachter, delivered a thorough explanation of the benefits and potential workings of the city’s municipal voucher program.

By Jim Clark

Director of the Office of Housing Stability (OHS) Ellen Shachter presented an update on the new municipal voucher program and other tools to promote affordable housing at the latest meeting of the Somerville City Council.

Shachter began by stating that she was excited about the infusion of funds to the municipal voucher and Flex-ARPA programs, then reviewed why establishing a municipal voucher program is important to the city.

In addressing the lack of deeply affordable units, Shachter pointed out that the city has been producing a significant number of new affordable units, but it has not really been able to reach the lowest tier residents below 50 percent Area Median Income (AMI) without vouchers. “It is really, really critical that we figure out how to produce new units, new housing stability for people at the lowest end of the income spectrum,” Shachter said.

The next point addressed by Shachter was the lack of access for immigrants. “As we work at OHS with different members of the community, every single day it becomes apparent to us both that there’s disproportionate need coming from the immigrant community for housing stability that there has been a disparate impact from Covid and from housing instability in general,” Shachter said. “Unfortunately, as many of you know, the federal government put some rules into place dating back over a decade, which essentially prohibits immigrants – any immigrants – from accessing federal housing resources.”

According to Shachter, there are very few tools that can be used for those families that are ineligible for these federal programs to stabilize them over the long term. “As you know, we’ve been working with rental assistance, we’ve been holding on, keeping people in place. But there needs to be permanent options for this population,” she said. “Because at some point rental assistance is insufficient to meet the need.”

Shachter next pointed out that since the opening of the OHS in August of 2018, 43.5 percent of their service requests came from households with a primary language other than English, with over 300 requests for rental assistance this year alone to date.

Inadequate existing solutions were then addressed by Shachter. “We’re coming up at OHS with this really significant clump of cases – families, not cases – households that we’re working with, with really no solutions,” said Shachter. “We have heard the same feedback from the Homeless Coalition, from CAAS, from Cambridge and Somerville Legal Services, that we absolutely needed to come up with options because there are so many people that we’ve been serving that we can look and say in eight months there’s not a solution they’ll either have to leave the city and in some cases go back to countries where they came from and in others maybe just leave the city and find housing elsewhere. But that is probably rare for most of these families.”

Finally, Shachter asserted that a municipal voucher program allows the OHS to have a program that is free from state and federal regulations, since a fully funded municipal voucher program is not subject to such regulations.

“That not only means that we’re free from immigration restrictions,” Shachter stated. “But what are the rents that we can set. Are they appropriate to our own community? What kind of resources are we going to need to get the most vulnerable, many non-English speaking families, into rental housing in this City of Somerville?”

Shachter says that since it’s municipal dollars, the OHS gets to figure out what works and design the program that’s going to work fast for the people that need it most.

Next, Shachter detailed what exactly the voucher is and what it is intended to accomplish.

Primarily, according to OHS, it is intended to be a long-term housing program providing deep rental subsidies to Somerville residents that are housing instable. It further intends to prioritize families that are ineligible for federal housing programs due to immigration status as follows:

• Sub-priority One: Families with children in Somerville public schools or preschools and;
• Sub-Priority Two: Seniors and people with disabilities.

The program seeks a permanent vendor, subject to appropriation, with experience administering low term housing subsidy programs.

As currently funded and conceived, the program estimates assistance for 30-35 families.

“I wanted to be really, really clear, this is intended to be a permanent program for as long as the families need the program,” Shachter said. “We would be trying to get them out of the program into permanent affordable housing, and they would be applying for that with us. But this program has to be available, subject to appropriation – which you guys [the City Council] are all a part of – but it has to be available over the long haul if it’s going to meet the expectations of this administration and my office of keeping people stably housed.”

Shachter went on to describe municipal voucher programs in other cities, along with details of how the program would be administered. She then reviewed the benefits of the voucher programs and explained how future funding of the program would work.

Shachter wrapped up by fielding a number of questions asked by members of the City Council.