Calls for Help Swamp Housing Commission
San Diego Housing Commission officials said Monday they expect to have about 20,000 low-income residents on a waiting list for housing by the end of the month, after they were inundated with thousands of calls from people inquiring about low-income housing.
Commission spokeswoman Mary Jo Riley said the housing agency has opened its waiting list for the first time since May, 1988, and expects it to grow by five times before it closes at the end of the month. The commission list now has 4,000 people, who must wait as long as four years for housing, Riley added.
Housing officials were expecting 20,000 calls from prospective applicants during December. Instead, the commission’s phone lines were jammed with 38,000 callers during the first 30 minutes Friday, when the agency began taking applications and updating its “interest list.” Not all of the callers qualify for low-income housing.
“It certainly verifies the need for housing assistance in San Diego,” said Riley about the enormous interest in the housing assistance program. “We estimate that there are about 80,000 people in San Diego who pay 30% or more of their income for rent.”
Under the Housing and Urban Development’s Section 8 program, low-income tenants pay 30% of their income for rent, and the rest is subsidized with federal funds.
“People here spend a disproportionate amount of their income for housing,” she said.
Riley said commission officials decided to open the waiting list after placing 1,733 families or elderly persons in federally subsidized housing in the last 18 months. That was made possible through additional Section 8 certificates granted to the commission by HUD, she said.
“We will be ready to get more certificates, when more are made available . . . so we thought this would be a good time to open our waiting list,” said Riley.
The commission now accommodates 7,000 families in Section 8 housing and 1,400 more families in commission-owned or managed units. A total of about 25,000 San Diegans benefit from subsidized housing, Riley said.
Friday morning, Pacific Bell officials urged housing agency officials to switch to a high-volume telephone prefix when it became apparent that the commission’s phone lines could not handle all calls.
Riley said the commission had set up a special phone bank at the former police headquarters on Harbor Drive to handle the anticipated 20,000 calls for the month.
“Nobody was prepared for the number of calls we got. We thought we were going to be able to get by with 10 operators and the 10 phones we had set aside. But, when you think of the people in need of this assistance, these are the people we’re trying to help,” she said.
The deluge of phone calls forced the agency to switch to a new number, 570-1178, and to hire four more operators to cover the phones, Riley added.
She attributed the large number of calls to advertisements placed by the commission in six newspapers, public service announcements, letters sent to 14,000 people and announcements placed with social service agencies.
“We decided to do it this way in order to be fair to the elderly and disabled, who otherwise could not camp out in front of the office to apply. We thought that the telephone method would be more equitable and safer,” Riley said.
