LRC chief: Rent subsidies to continue for 6 months

• By SANDY DAVIS
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Feb 12, 2009 - Page: 15A - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The 17,000 households in Louisiana receiving Disaster Housing Assistance will continue to get rent subsidies for the next six months even though the program ends March 1, said Paul Rainwater, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority.

Rainwater said Wednesday the promised subsidies are the result of a commitment that Shaun Donovan, the newly appointed secretary of Housing and Urban Development, made during an hour and half meeting Tuesday.

“Mr. Donovan basically said, ‘I hear you, Louisiana, and this is what I’m going to do for you: I’m going to transition these folks for six months,’ ” Rainwater said of the meeting.

The subsidies promised by Donovan will give the state time to transition families enrolled in DHAP into other programs that provide permanent housing.

Up until that meeting, Rainwater said, he wasn’t sure what was going to happen to some of the 30,000 households enrolled in the program nationwide, including 900 in Baton Rouge.

“We were very concerned that some of them were going to end up homeless,” he said. “There were a whole group of people who were going to be left without any subsidies.”

Last fall, Congress approved $85 million for the Housing Choice Voucher Program, which would take over housing subsidies for some of those enrolled in DHAP, including low-income households, the elderly and the disabled.

Rainwater said that left about 7,000 Louisiana households without any rental assistance.

Rainwater said Donovan, U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and he have worked out the framework for a plan to help those people get permanent help: a Section 8 Project Based Voucher program.

“We believe this program would cover the other households who lose their DHAP assistance but aren’t eligible for the Housing Choice Program,” said Stephanie Allen, a spokesman for Landrieu.

Allen said the program is only a plan and has not been finalized.

“That’s why we haven’t issued a news release,” she said. “We have the bones, just not the meat.”

One of the strong points for the Section 8 program is that it will get rid of some of the problems people experienced in DHAP, including the complaint that people were living in substandard housing.