Gustav, Ike payments end

A temporary housing assistance plan provided by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development following hurricanes Gustav and Ike in 2008 came to an end Jan. 31, and both federal and parish officials admit they do not know off-hand who of the more than 20,000 participants displaced by the storms will no longer qualify for government assistance of any form.

In an effort to help families find permanent homes or repair their existing ones, HUD said it had 3,500 Louisiana households still enrolled in the Disaster Housing Assistance Program at the time it ended, and was offering $28 million, approved by Congress, in Housing Choice Vouchers to those that qualify.

“Over these past five years, we’ve worked to help tens of thousands of families get back on their feet and we are committed to helping families remaining in the Disaster Housing Assistance Program make that transition,” HUD Secretary Sean Donavan said in a printed statement released last Tuesday.

Families remaining from the DHAP have until March 31 to apply to participate in the HCV program. The HCV would assist qualified participants to not have to pay more than 30 percent of their income on rent.

Transitioning DHAP participants to the HCV program and determining what Louisiana residents might be able to benefit from it might not be as simple as it sounds. According to HUD spokeswoman Donna White there is some uncertainty as to how many people were still being covered by the DHAP on the cutoff date, and how many might still be part of the system by the new deadline.

The latest figures by HUD were totaled as of Sept. 1, 2011. At that time Louisiana had 12,305 families assigned. Texas listed 27,673 families n itself exceeding the federal agency’s estimated total of still active participants.

Of the assigned Louisianans, a total 1,198 were listed as being in Terrebonne Parish. There are none listed in for Lafourche or St. Mary parishes. Areas with existing DHAP participants include New Orleans along with Lake Charles, and East Baton Rouge, West Baton Rouge, Jefferson, Lafayette, Calcasieu, St. Charles, Ouachita, Avoyelles, Evangeline, Sabine and Bossier parishes.

White said last Wednesday that because the calculations are five months old and processing has continued during that time period, there is no way of knowing an accurate number of participants to date.

HUD figures list 55 Terrebonne families as being eligible for continued HCV assistance, but Terrebonne Parish Health and Human Services Director Darrel Waire said that number is more accurately estimated to be 25 families.

“There is funding for regular Section 8 housing,” he said of those that might not qualify for the HCV. The catch, he explained, is that leftover individuals might not qualify for the stricter Section 8 or any other program.

“It is not a permanent funding allowance,” Waire said of the $28 million allocation. “The people that are still on the DHAP now are people of very low income, but during conversion their income increased and now some have income higher than [what is allowed] for Section 8.”

“One of the things we found was that some recipients [on DHAP through last week’s deadline] were either elderly, elderly with disabilities, [working age] individuals with disabilities or families that fell below the 30 percent average monthly income [for rent level],” White said.

The HUD representative did not want to confirm that some people make a living by receiving disaster assistance or other government help, but she and Waire both admitted that measures are taken to separate the truly needy from those that want to take advantage of the system.

“We do quarterly assessments of income,” White said of the procedure to determine continued eligibility. “These families [on the DHAP] were required to participate in case management. They had to work with a case manager on a regular basis and these case managers worked with families on housing searches, job searches and financial literacy programs. We work with these families on a routine basis and try to get them to self-sufficiency.”

“We can only go by what the federal guidelines allow,” Waire said of qualification screening, enforcement and helping the genuinely helpless. “But I can tell you that there are a number of people on disaster assistance that do not qualify for Section 8. I really don’t know how many, but they are not going to be transitioned.”

Hurricane Gustav leaves some Louisiana residents stranded more than three years after the storm made landfall and as housing assistance programs come to an end those that qualified for one kind of assistance fail to meet requirements for continued help. FILE PHOTO