Humboldt County’s Housing First efforts to rapidly house homeless individuals have helped more than 160 people find housing. But there are still hundreds more waiting on the same opportunity because of the local housing shortage, according to local officials.
County Department of Health and Human Services Senior Program Manager Sally Hewitt said the county and other organizations have hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant funding each year that can be used to assist homeless or very low-income individuals to pay for rent and security deposits. However, Hewitt said there is not enough housing available for these funds to even to be used.
“There’s at least 300 people who are ready to go if housing could be made available to them,” Hewitt said.
Hewitt said part of the difficulty of finding housing for subsidized renters is that the housing must comply with federal quality standards, which Hewitt said many properties do not meet.
“We have been aggressively working to house a lot of folks and we aim at housing that is less than $700 a month,” Hewitt said. “Pretty much every affordable house that meets that we have rented.”
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