Hi! Welcome to our Google Hangout. Today is… not January – it’s December 30th – we normally do these on Wednesdays, but since tomorrow’s New Year’s Eve, we thought we’d do it a day early. We actually hadn’t planned on doing one of these hangouts until next week or the week after, but there’s a lot going on with Housing Choice voucher waiting lists. We actually have 15 different waiting lists that are opening up next month, and I think one on the first week of February. So, I wanted to go ahead and jump in, and give you a little summary of some of the larger waiting lists that are opening up, and then we’ve got about 103 or so waiting lists that are open right now, many of which are open all of the time, and you can find that information on our openings – actually waiting lists page – many of you watching the video right now are actually on that page. If you just scroll down the page, you’re going to find a treasure trove of waiting lists that are open.
Remember, you don’t have to live in a specific area to apply for that waiting list. Many Section 8 programs have a local residency preference, which means that if you are a local resident, you get bumped up the list, above those who aren’t local residents, but you can still apply. If you do end up coming up on the list, and you’re called for voucher or issued a voucher, you would have to move to that city or county that the housing board’s program area [is for], and live there for one year before you could actually port that voucher back to your home or somewhere else in the country. But again, don’t forget that you can apply for a Section 8 program anywhere in the country.
All right, I’m going to go ahead and jump in and let’s start with a couple of programs that we just learned about. El Paso, Texas – they’re actually opening up their wait list on January 2nd at midnight. It closes on the 31st at 11:59pm. It’s an online application only, and the Housing Authority has noted on their website that the waiting list is approximately 2-6 years long. That’s a pretty wide range, but that’s from their website. If you want some more information about that opening, and any of the openings that I talk about, you can start at the Section 8 Waiting List page on our site, and that will lead you through to detailed pages about each of these openings I’m talking about. We provide very detailed information – how each program is going to work, when it opens, when it closes, whether it’s online, whether it’s [got] specific preferences, and we always provide a link to the official housing authority website. Make sure, whenever you’re applying for Section 8, that you’re applying on the official housing authority website. There’s a lot of scam sites out there that try to get your personal information, usually for marketing purposes, and they use Section 8 applications as a cover. We aren’t one of those; we work hard to make sure that our users are getting the best information, and we’re sending them to the correct, official sites.
So, anyway. Moving on to the next on the list – Lexington, Kentucky opens for the first time since 2010, on January 5th, and it closes on January 9th, so it’s only going to be open for a business week. It’s online only, and there will be 500 applications selected via random lottery. Again, details on that opening are on our Lexington pages.
Sarasota, Florida – we just found this one actually over the weekend, and they’ve announced an opening for January 5th, and it’s closing on the 19th. It’s an online application. There will be 750 applications selected by random lottery. There is a preference for local residents, and elderly, disabled, and homeless folks.
Atlanta – this is actually the biggest one on our list to talk about today – and they’ve not been opened, oh, I think since like 2001 or 2002 – it’s been 12/13 years now. We actually just did, a week or two ago, a live Google Hangout just like this with Shean Atkins, an official with the Atlanta Housing Authority – about 25 or 30 minute talk about the program, and if you go to the Atlanta page on our website, you’ll see a link to that video. It’s very, very informative with lots of great questions [that] got answered by Shean. Thanks again, Shean. So, go check that video out. But Atlanta’s opening up on January 6th, at 9am. It closes on January 13th at 5. It’s an online only application and Atlanta is a little bit different than most Housing Authority, Section 8 programs that you know of. It’s a Moving to Work program. It requires anyone in the program to be working full time, or going to school full time, or a combination of both, but you have to be – it has to be full time. And so, if you’re not working, or you lose your job, you don’t qualify for the program. It’s somewhat more complicated than that, and there’s a lot more detail on both our Atlanta pages, and then we send you on to the Atlanta Housing Authority with more detailed information.
Actually, we had a user question come in earlier today, and Sylvia asks about having to live and work in Atlanta to apply. There is – you know, you don’t have to be in Atlanta; there is no local preference and we pointedly asked that question of Shean Atkins in our Google Hangout video, and he highlights the fact that you don’t have to be a local resident; local residents don’t receive any kind priority over nonlocal residents, but you have to have a job. So the answer to your question, no, you don’t have to live in Atlanta, but really – you have to have a full time job.
So let’s move on to the next waiting list that’s opening. Another fairly large city is Salt Lake City. They’re opening their waiting list on January 8th at 8am. It’s being opened for an underdetermined period of time; they have not announced the closing date. We’ll try and keep tabs on that and update Salt Lake City pages as we learn that. The current wait time is approximately 5 years for Salt Lake City. It’s an online application, and actually, I think they’re allowing some in person applications, as well. You can get all the details of that on our Salt Lake pages.
On to Oregon; Deschutes County, Oregon is opening on January 12th – they close on January 16th. It’s an online only application, and that program serves Deschutes County, and it includes the cities of Bend, Redmond, Sisters, La Pine, Prineville, Madras – hopefully I didn’t butcher the pronunciations on those names. If you’re from Oregon, and I did, my apologies.
We’ve got a few programs in Florida, other than Sarasota, to mention – they are somewhat smaller. But we get a lot of folks on our Facebook page and in email asking about Florida waiting lists. So, we’re just going to briefly mention each one, and then you can go to the waiting list page and find those listed. But Crestview Housing Authority opens on the 12th. It’s open until the 23rd. The Housing Authority of Springfield will open from the 13-22nd. I think Springfield is adjacent to Panama City, if I’m not mistaken, so it’s near a larger metropolitan area. Deland Housing Authority is going to open from 16th of January to the 18th, and Flagler County Housing Authority is going to be open briefly on January 20th until their application quota is met. So, if you live in Florida, or are interested in moving to Florida, you might want to go check the – our open waiting list page for the Florida programs.
Lastly, I want to touch on Spokane, Washington. It opens on January 26th at 10am, and closes at 3 on the 30th. It’s an online only application. They’re going to select 600 applications by random lottery. Applicants who applied to the 2014 opening must reapply for the 2015 opening; you won’t be added to the waiting list if you applied last year. So make sure that if you weren’t selected in that lottery, you make sure you go ahead and reapply this year. And a link to check the status of your 2014 waiting list is available on our Spokane pages.
We’ve got other upcoming waiting lists openings to tell you about on our website; I won’t go into detail on some of the smaller programs in this Hangout, but you can find them all on our open Section 8 waiting lists page. Lastly, I have a few questions from our users, and we really enjoy helping out our users. We answer lots and lots of questions on our Facebook page, and if you have a question right now on Facebook and you haven’t got an answer, we apologize – short staffed during the holidays, we probably have about 100-120 questions sitting there waiting to be answered; but we’re working on those. But I’m going to try to answer a couple of those questions right now in the Hangout, so I’ll jump right in.
One of them was, if I have a voucher, which I’m using to rent an apartment, can I move to a new apartment in the same city – what are the limitations? And, the answer is yes, you can move within the same city with your voucher – in fact, you can move across the country with a voucher, but there’s always certain rules. I’m not going to talk about moving across the country, because that’s a deeper process called portability, but I’ll talk about moving from one apartment in the same city to another apartment. And, you know, that’s perfectly okay. It’s called the Housing Choice Voucher Program because HUD and Congress, when they created the program, wanted the users to have a choice in where they lived. So, you can choose your neighborhood; you can choose where you live under certain restrictions. So, for one, the apartment obviously has to meet the Housing Authority’s requirements on physical standards, it has to meet a certain inspection, it has to be at a certain rent level, and there’s some other nuances. If you currently have a lease on an apartment using the voucher program, you really are – and you have a lease that you can’t get out of for say, 6 months say it’s a 12 month lease and you’re 6 months in, and you want to move – I would suggest you not break the lease especially if there’s no cause for breaking the lease, because it could possibly – I’m not going to say it always will be a problem with the Housing Authority and potentially losing your voucher – but it could possibly cause problems for you, if that landlord wanted to fight you breaking the lease. It could end up affecting your voucher. So, I wouldn’t recommend breaking the lease unless you can negotiate some deal with the landlord, where they’re happy, and there’s no conflict there. And then the other – and I’m sure there’s plenty of other reasons that might stop you from moving from one apartment to the other – but the other possibility is if you’re trying to move to an apartment property that has, for example, project based Section 8. They have to use that Section 8 with each of the apartment units there, which means that if you were to, say, come up on the waiting lists for ABC Apartments in Denver, and they have a Section 8 project based certificate that goes along with that property, then when you go to move in there, you don’t need your voucher anymore. There’s already Section 8 associated with that apartment. The problem with that is that, you’re going to have to – you’d have to give up your voucher to move into that property. You couldn’t use that voucher to pay for rent at that property. So, that could be a problem – and most people – vouchers are such a rare commodity – most people wouldn’t want to give a voucher up to do that. So, that’s that question.
Two more, real quick.
Can a voucher be transferred to my children? We hear this quite often, and I think there’s a misconception that you can. In fact, you can’t transfer a voucher to your children, or anyone else for that matter. Section 8 vouchers are issued to you and only you. Your kids can’t inherit them; you can’t decide that you’re going to move out and give them the voucher, ‘cause they were living with you and when they turned 18 you’re going to hand it over to them. I’m not aware of any mechanism that you can do that within the regulation. So, the simple answer is no, you can’t transfer a voucher to your children.
And then, the last question is at what age can dependents apply for Section 8 on their own? The simple age is 18. Every housing authority has a minimum age requirement to apply for Section 8, and that’s 18. But most – and this may actually be a federal regulation, we’d have to clarify – but there is one caveat, and that is if the child is emancipated, which through legal process, someone under 18 could legally be considered independent – so the answer to the question is, they have got to be 18 or emancipated to qualify.
So, that’s today’s Section 8 update. Again, go to our Facebook page and our website to get more information on a bunch of other openings that I didn’t talk about. And I want everyone to have a great holiday, and a Happy New Year. We’ll try and do another one of these next week and touch on more details. So, anyways, thanks again for watching, and thanks for using Affordable Housing online. I hope we brought you a little bit closer to home.
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