The Iowa City Housing Authority has established a financial incentive program to help 19 households find affordable housing.
The Iowa City Housing Authority is a division of the Iowa City government that assists low-income families in finding affordable housing in the community. They offer voucher programs to people experiencing homelessness, particularly those who are elderly, disabled, or have children.
Within the voucher programs, members can apply for assistance on the City of Iowa City Website. The 19 selected households are part of the mainstream voucher program and need additional support in finding housing. The new incentive program acts as an extension of the mainstream voucher program, established in 2019, to help individuals with disabilities find adequate housing.
According to the City of Iowa City, the housing authority provides the Housing Choice Voucher Program to assist families with housing difficulties, including elderly individuals and those with disabilities, to determine the amount of rent they must pay based on their level of income. The landlords then collect that portion of the rent and are in charge of maintaining the unit and enforcing the lease.
Rachel Carter, the housing administrator for the organization, said the program offers landlords $1,000 for adult-only households and $2,000 for households with children.
“We’ll offer these dollar amounts for these 19 households for at least 120 days and then see where we’re at and evaluate how the program is and what feedback we’ve gotten from landlords,” Carter said. “So this is really an experiment for us to see how this can go and how we can help voucher holders find housing more quickly.”
Carter said the incentive program aims to help the landlords effectively rent to the 19 mainstream voucher holders who have more difficulty finding proper housing.
“These households in particular have some additional barriers because they have a disability, and whatever that disability may look like, finding housing that is successful for those disabilities can be trickier than finding housing for anyone else,” Carter said. “And we’re hoping this puts a little icing on the cake for landlords, that this makes it more appealing to rent to a household that might have some barriers.”
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The mainstream voucher program is administered through the Iowa City Shelter House, an organization providing an array of housing services for Johnson, Iowa, and Washington counties.
The services within Shelter House include permanent support of housing, where people can find homes in the community and supportive services for people currently in shelters to access housing. They may or may not need financial support, but case managers are provided to help voucher holders navigate the process of finding landlords.
Christine Hayes, the director of development and communications at Shelter House, said Shelter House has been collaborating with the housing authority to ensure the households are receiving proper services.
“We communicate regularly with the housing authority to talk about barriers, to talk about needs,” Hayes said. ”And through knowing that some households are harder to house based on, typically, rental history or maybe family size, it can be hard to find a place that is willing to rent.”
Harvey Wilhelm, a housing program assistant at the Iowa City Housing Authority, said landlords are becoming more aware of the incentive and asking for new tenants within the mainstream program.
“I think landlords are potentially getting more interested in incentives like these,” Wilhelm said. “But right now we’re only able to offer it for those specific clients in the mainstream program.”
Carter said the housing authority and Shelter House are continuing to support the 19 households and ensure they can rent adequate housing.
“The Shelter House [has been] working with them for quite a while, trying to find housing,” Carter said. “As [we get] into colder months, we thought we would try and see how we can help incentivize. Nationally, this is a pretty common landlord incentive structure. We’ve not used it in Iowa City, so we’re gonna try it and see if it helps.”