Nursing student Amanda Freeman at her friend's house in Easthampton, Massachusetts, where she stayed while looking for housing.
“I would not be able to afford a one-bedroom apartment by myself,” she said. “And my sister's a nurse and my mom's a nurse.”First she was offered a room in a six-person group house, where they would have to share one shower. It was $500 a month. In retrospect, that was probably a good deal. And that’s what most housing experts have noticed too — in the past year, the rental market has shrunk considerably.
With a voucher, a tenant can theoretically live anywhere that accepts it — including market-rate apartments, although the first year must be in the region in which someone applied. On its website, the federal housing department, HUD, acknowledges long Section 8 waitlists around the country due to “In an email, a HUD spokesperson said that while 100,000 new vouchers were created in the last few years under the American Rescue Plan Act, that still leaves enough for only a quarter of those who qualify.
Holyoke, for example, reports having about 1,800 vouchers, but more than 6,000 people on its waitlist. Springfield has 3,000 vouchers, and pulls from the state’s centralized waiting list.Katie Talbot, a 41-year-old community organizer, has been on that waiting list since 2008. By now, she’s been on the waitlist so long — about 15 years — that she’s not sure she still needs it.
“The need is much higher than the availability,” Fairey said. “That's not unique or new to Hampshire County or Massachusetts, but that's a problem in our country around housing affordability.” “It was a lot of filling out paperwork and a lot of interviews and uncomfortable questions and stuff like that,” she said, “but I was just really grateful to get a Section 8 voucher.”
Even so, many of the 100 or so places Freeman considered did not pass federal guidelines, or they cost too much, or she was competing with 30 other people. “I was getting to a point where, like, if someone said another platitude to me again, like, ‘Oh, don't worry, it's all going to work out’ — and I'm like, I'm going to throw something at the next person that says that to me, because it's like it didn't feel like it was all going to work out,” she said.