But the city’s poorest residents have far fewer options. More than 5,000 extremely low-income households vie for about 1,500 units that are affordable at that level — renting for about $663 a month for a family of four. And every year, dozens of residents apply for one of the city’s income-restricted units, built with a mix of federal low-income housing tax credits and state and local subsidies.
The paperwork needed to access one of those units is extensive. Applicants have to provide different types of documentation, including proof of income, for homes that are built with different types of subsidies. Partly because of the complexity of the applications, income-restricted units sometimes sit vacant for months. The vacancy rate for subsidized housing has actually been higher than the overall rate for the city’s rental market in some recent years, says Logan Penfield, Sioux Falls’ housing development manager.
Property managers will sometimes get an application with one piece of information missing and then spend weeks tracking it down. “It just was a disorganized system,” Penfield says. “Our question was, how do we speed that up?”
Now the city has a system it hopes will be cheap, simple and effective. It’s building an online portal that case managers can use to fill out multiple applications at once. Working with low-income applicants, case managers will gather the necessary information to apply for all types of subsidized housing, which can be used to generate different applications.
“There’s a benefit for both sides,” Penfield says. “The property managers now have more qualified individuals that are trying to get into those units, hopefully driving down vacancy rates. And for the case managers, they can get people housed quicker.”
Connecting Disparate Parts
The idea for the online tool grew out of discussions among city officials about creating a housing clinic for extremely low-income people. The idea was to help connect them with a loose network of housing case managers who work for various public agencies and nonprofit organizations. It was initially envisioned as an in-person service, but the city later decided to develop it as a web tool instead.
The tool isn’t complex to use, Penfield says. But its success or failure will depend on managing relationships between the city, service providers and property managers.
Breanna White, a housing coordinator who works for both Sioux Falls and Minnehaha County, says the tool is similar to other resources in places such as Detroit and San Jose, but a key difference is that it’s only available to housing case managers, not the public. That provides a level of confidence to property managers that applications are complete and accurate.
“Not only are they going to get a substantially complete application, but also they’re not going to have to do the chasing down of people whose phone numbers are changing all the time or whose voicemail is full or they never check their email,” White says. “A lot of these units maybe are sitting there for weeks waiting because someone’s been approved but they don’t know they’ve been approved. So having that case manager as a point of contact is really going to alleviate some of that burden on the property managers.”
Not Enough Case Managers
One potential drawback of the approach is that case managers are relatively scarce in the area, White says. Their caseloads could become overwhelming, assuming the tool works as intended.
The Sioux Falls City Council approved a $118,000 contract with a web developer last week to build out the website. That’s about the same value per unit for the zero-interest loans the city provides tax-credit developers to help structure financing for affordable housing projects. And it’s money that could help a lot more people, Penfield says.
“It’s not going to be some silver bullet that solves everything,” he says. “But what it can be is a tool that improves the system that we have in place.”
