A new stream of state housing funding aims to help prevent evictions in targeted precincts throughout Pima County, where more than 13,000 evictions were filed last year.
Pima County will receive $575,000 from the Arizona Department of Housingβs pilot program to help struggling renters avoid eviction, a legal action that can have dire and long-lasting consequences for vulnerable renters living on the edge of poverty.
The Pima County Board of Supervisors formally accepted the grant, which will be effective in February, in a 5-0 vote this week. The housing departmentβs eviction-prevention pilot program draws from $2 million in funding from the State Housing Trust Fund.
Pima Countyβs Community Action Agency will distribute the funds in partnership with other contracted agencies that provide emergency rent and utility assistance.
The grant funding will be targeted toward renters who have a temporary gap in funds for their housing costs and for whom one monthβs assistance will allow them to return to stability.
Recipients must show they will be stable for at least 90 days after receiving the funding to help them make it through the month, said Manira Cervantes, program manager for the Community Action Agency, one of several programs under the countyβs Community Services, Employment and Training Department.
Those who canβt demonstrate that stability will be referred to other options for assistance, she said.
βThe need, unfortunately, is outrageous in comparison to the funding available,β Cervantes said.
The funding will help assist an additional 407 families in need, and the assistance is capped at $1,000 per recipient.
The targeted funds will address just one of the many factors contributing to evictions, but itβs a crucial start, said Supervisor Richard ElΓas.
βIf we can keep people in their housing for longer and forestall evictions, it makes a huge difference in the pressure on the (rental) market to provide more places that are affordable and clean for folks,β he said. βEven though it is a stop-gap measure, it makes all the difference in the world for those families that get help.β
An Arizona Daily Star special report in November found that judges in Pima County Consolidated Justice Courts ordered 25 evictions a day in the last fiscal year. While the number of evictions filed in Pima County has dropped since pre-recession levels, local housing advocates are anticipating a surge in housing instability, as rents rise and vacancy rates drop to historic lows.
Despite its relatively cheap cost of living, Tucson has a housing affordability problem, housing advocates say. Among poor renter households in Tucson earning between 50 percent and 100 percent of the federal poverty level, 92.5 percent spent more than 30 percent of their income on housing costs, according to a 2018 survey by UA student researchers.
Families who experience an eviction often struggle to recover and can be pushed into homelessness and poverty, housing advocates say. An eviction on your record makes it extremely difficult to find another landlord willing to rent to you, and evicted renters are almost always terminated from the Housing Choice Voucher program, known as Section 8.
The resource-strapped Section 8 program currently has a waiting list of more than 16,000 people, so losing that voucher can be devastating, advocates say.
The housing department grant will be concentrated on renters living in three Justice Precincts with the highest rates of eviction: Precincts 6, 8 and 9, which include most of ZIP codes 85705 and 85706, the two hardest hit by evictions in the county.
Limited funding will also be available for renters in the following ZIP codes: 85701, 85704, 85710, 85711, 85712, 85713, 85714, 85716, 85719, 85741, 85742, 85745, 85746 and 85756.
