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Rental assistance tenants left with
few housing options

By QUINCY COLLINS SMITH
quincycollins44@aol.com

GULFPORT - When you walk through the front door of Marilyn Dove's home at 3023 53rd Ave., the pungent smell of mold is stifling.

Landlords with C&I Properties have recently begun to clean off the mold. But seven months after Hurricane Katrina, the smell made the air so thick and hard to breathe that Dove had to send her teenage son with respiratory problems to live with a family friend.

Dove is one of roughly 850 public housing tenants in South Mississippi who have been displaced because their rental homes were deemed destroyed or non-inhabitable. Dove takes part in a Section VIII rental assistance program offered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Mississippi Housing Authority.

Officials with the housing authority's region VIII office, which serves the Coast, say the housing shortage has made problems relocating tenants with subsidized rent an everyday reality.

FEMA inspectors found that Dove's home was suitable for living and has denied her three times for housing assistance, but inspectors with the Mississippi Regional Housing Authority VIII say the home does not meet HUD's housing quality standards.

Dove is caught in a Catch-22 between two bureaucracies designed to help her and others without a safety net in the storm, but because of an eviction ordered Friday by a Harrison County Justice Court judge, she could soon find herself without a home.

"This is not about the money," Dove said. "This is about a place for my son and I to lay our heads."

Dove said her search for a new rental home that accepts her rental subsidy has been unsuccessful. "It's horrible," Dove said. "There's just nowhere to live."

Attorneys working with the Mississippi Center for Justice, an advocate for improvements in the low-income housing system for Katrina survivors, took an interest in Dove's case.

Volunteer law students working with the center have taken a snapshot of eviction activity in justice courts and surveyed the condition of subsidized housing.

According to their survey, they found that 75 to 80 percent of subsidized housing in Harrison and Hancock counties was destroyed or is non-inhabitable.

While recording eviction cases on the Coast, volunteers found that 95 percent of tenants in eviction cases did not have attorneys and nearly 100 percent of those tenants without attorneys lost their cases.

"Nearly all of the tenants with representation win or get partial relief," said John with the Center for Justice.

In February, Dove's landlords repaired the roof and patched drywall in her kitchen and living room. Landlords started removing the mold last week.

Susie and Chad Nichols, Dove's landlords with C&I Properties, describe Dove as an ideal tenant who lived in the house for four years and often made minor repairs on her own.

Section VIII officials with the housing authority say Dove's records show inspectors deemed the rental house in violation of housing quality standards in November and gave C&I Properties an extension. Section VIII authorities paid their portion of the rent up to Jan. 3 and issued her a transfer voucher.

Nichols said his office never received the notices from the housing authority and began repairs when they saw the inspection list in February. After making several repairs, Nichols asked housing authorities for a reinspection but was denied.

"The ideal situation would be to keep Marilyn because she has been a good tenant," Chad Nichols said. "I'm not in the business of losing tenants. I don't want Marilyn to leave, but at the same time, I can't not collect anything on the rent."

By law, if rental homes do not meet the standards, the regional housing officials must stop payments to landlords and offer the residents "transfer vouchers" to relocate, said Mark Creech, director of Section VIII for the Mississippi Regional Housing Authority.

"We gave them an extension but at the end of the extension, they still had not made necessary repairs," said Creech.

Creech called the issue an everyday problem because nothing is available. He said rental assistance tenants are left with few options until more rental properties are built and renovated.

"You can't call it a trend," Creech, said. "You can call it a fact of life right now."

Jopling said answering that need depends on how communities advocate for affordable housing.

"What we want is decent, affordable and assessable housing," Jopling said. "If we don't do it right, everything else about the recovery will be irrelevant."

To get help

Attorneys with the Mississippi Center for Justice can be reached at 435-7284.