After reading about the millions of dollars of housing assistance available in Spokane, Cindy Denham wonders why she’s preparing to spend another night sleeping on a city street.

Although she enrolled in a rapid rehousing program through a local nonprofit about three months ago, Denham is still waiting, and has received no assurances about when she’ll be able to find an apartment.

“There’s help and there’s money,” Denham said. “Why are we out in the cold?

“Why do we have to worry about getting into a shelter?”

Much of the public discourse on homelessness centers on its most visible consequences, like people huddled under viaducts, and the capacity of shelters to house them overnight.

But housing is a spectrum, and for people to exit homelessness there must be a home available to them.

The low inventory of housing and rapidly rising rents in Spokane have frustrated those who work to find apartments for people like Denham.

“The supply is what’s killing us. We have the funding – a lot of agencies do,” said Dan Lessiak, the homeless services manager for Spokane Neighborhood Action Partners. “The supply that we need is so limited that we’re not able to get people housed as quickly as we used to.”

For Denham, who is working to get off the street, the delays are enormously frustrating.

She emphasizes that she does not prefer to live on the street, and she is reluctant to stay in a shelter because she has a chronic lung disease and fears contracting the coronavirus.

“I am not choosing this lifestyle,” Denham said.

But she has done the math.

Denham’s monthly take-home pay from Social Security Disability Insurance is $611 a month. The average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Spokane County this fall was $1,043 and the vacancy rate was about 1%, according to a survey conducted by the Washington Center for Real Estate Research at the University of Washington.

Dan Lessiak estimates that the vacancy rate for low-income apartments is actually closer to 0.1%.

With those numbers in mind, Denham knows that her odds of securing an apartment on her own – even with her steady and reliable income – are low.

Rapid rehousing could help.

Through its rapid rehousing program, SNAP offers financial assistance to secure housing for people who qualify. The dollar amount depends on the person and their needs, but the goal is always to get them stable and self-sufficient as quickly as possible.

“We don’t just pay rent, get someone into a place, pay …….

Source: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2021/dec/12/why-are-we-out-in-the-cold-tight-housing-market-st/