Many Quake Victims Still Await New Apartments : Housing: About 8,000 families have been unable to cash in their emergency vouchers because HUD has not inspected their old and new homes.

Four months after the Jan. 17 earthquake, 40% of the nearly 19,000 low-income families who received emergency-housing vouchers still haven’t moved into new apartments, a top Housing and Urban Development official said Friday.

“I believe the program has been extraordinarily successful,” said Joseph Shuldiner, HUD’s assistant secretary for housing. But 8,000 families have not been able to exchange their vouchers for temporary apartments chiefly because they must wait for HUD to inspect both their old and new homes.

About 3,000 families have found new places to live and just need those inspections, Shuldiner said. “I would expect in another month we’ll have taken care of the balance of people who still need housing.”

The HUD vouchers pay most of the rent for displaced, low-income quake victims for 18 months. The deadline for applying for the vouchers was April 30. HUD set aside $200 million for the program.

Shuldiner did not blame the delay on uncooperative landlords. On the contrary, he said, the publicity the special voucher program has received since the Northridge quake has made more landlords aware of HUD’s ongoing housing-assistance programs.

The vouchers were expressly created to encourage landlords to rent to low-income quake victims. Voucher recipients pay 30% of their monthly income to the landlord and HUD pays the balance for 18 months.

Shuldiner said HUD doesn’t expect to extend the voucher program to more than 18 months of housing assistance.

“We realize we’re only giving people middle-term relief,” he said. “But until we get through this period we won’t know who will need more aid.”

He said the voucher program’s only goal was to help people find housing and stabilize their lives.

“In Santa Monica, that’s probably going to happen because many of the victims there were working folk who can get themselves back on their feet in 18 months,” he said. “But in the Valley and other parts of Los Angeles, there were more lower-income people.”

In the interview, Shuldiner also addressed the issue of illegal immigrants possibly getting some of the aid. Starting Feb. 25, he said, HUD required voucher applicants to sign declarations stating they were legal citizens of the United States or otherwise in the country legally and to show California identification, such as a driver’s license.

From the time those controls were adopted, Shuldiner said, “fewer than 1% of applicants refused to sign the declarations. That tells me the number of illegal aliens trying to apply for vouchers was insignificant.”

Some critics of the program questioned whether the voucher program was necessary in addition to the traditional Federal Emergency Management Agency housing assistance program. Together, they added up to $8.6 billion of federal relief, the most expensive disaster-aid effort in U.S. history.

Shuldiner said HUD is studying whether the voucher program should be used in the wake of other disasters and what changes, if any, should be made in it.