It’s always a pleasure to get into the community to see how the demand for affordable housing in the community is being met. Today, the Greenville Housing Fund team did that by going the Preserve at Logan Place for the quarterly meeting of the Greenville Affordable Housing Coalition.
This group brings together all of the major stakeholders in our effort to create more affordable housing in Greenville. We are honored to work with such amazing people from such wonderful organizations.
The big story today, though, was about vouchers. The Greenville Housing Authority runs a program that helps lower-wealth families and people move into housing by offering financial assistance to help cover the costs of rent. There are currently more than 300 households in the voucher program that are waiting on placement. These are people who are working everyday in our community in the jobs we all see. They are fast-food workers. Waitstaff. People working the checkout line. Their lives are in limbo as they wait.
The Greenville Housing Authority recently was designated as a federal Moving to Work Agency, which gives it many more tools to work with landlords to get households with vouchers into permanent housing.
Moving to Work (MTW) is a demonstration program for public housing authorities (PHAs) that provides them the opportunity to design and test innovative, locally designed strategies that use Federal dollars more efficiently, help residents find employment and become self-sufficient, and increase housing choices for low-income families. MTW allows PHAs exemptions from many existing public housing and voucher rules and provides funding flexibility with how they use their Federal funds. PHAs in the MTW demonstration have pioneered a number of innovative policy interventions that have been proven to be successful at the local level, and subsequently rolled out to the rest of the country’s PHAs.
