Collier turns to Lee County for affordable housing

• The Section 8 Housing Choice program helps people afford market rate rents
• Their incomes must be half the area median or less.
• Service workers, the disabled and the elderly benefit most.
• About 75 percent of those who qualify for assistance are wait-listed or don't apply, according to the Urban Institute.

In all of Collier County’s 2,000 square miles, there aren’t enough affordable homes for 444 families.

That’s the reality that led Oscar Hentschel, the county’s housing authority executive director, to reach a pact with his counterpart at the Housing Authority of the City of Fort Myers, combining their home-hunting turf across county lines.

“My clients cannot find any housing in Collier because rents are too high,” said Hentschel, who has  1,200 people in waiting on a list that opens up every five to six years.

Not that its Lee counterparts don’t have a similar problem; it’s just not as bad. Lee County's housing authority provides 2,018 vouchers and currently has about 2,800 people on its waiting list, which opens up every two to three years.

Housing vouchers don't pay the rent

“What drove this was a request by the Collier authority to open up Lee housing stock to a small number of their voucher holders," executive director Marcus Goodson said. "We don’t think it will have a negative impact on our participants, or we wouldn’t do it,"

The agreement allows Hentschel’s clients to find a rental across a much larger area without going through a bulky administrative process known as ‘porting’ – when a person with a voucher in one city moves to another.

“Porting is time consuming because the other city has to manage my voucher for me, and we would reimburse them every month," the Collier housing director said. "This way, we’ll administer our own vouchers, whether they live in Collier or Lee. It helps out both housing authorities."

The agreement is reciprocal, so Lee voucher holders can seek housing in a Collier community if they choose.

Hentschel believes many would take advantage of the reciprocity to live in Collier if they could find an affordable unit.

“They work in Naples and commute an hour or an hour and a half to have a place to live,” he said. “And that’s just to pay rent. Not to own a house.”

No place to run

The Section 8 Housing Choice program helps people afford market rate rents if they earn half the area’s median income or less. The renter pays 30 percent of their income for housing, and the federally funded program pays the remainder, up to what it considers a reasonable amount.

But the program is increasingly challenged by a perfect storm of stalled wages and a hard charging housing market; not just in Southwest Florida, but nationwide.

July’s median rent rate in Collier’s most affordable ZIP code was $2,195 a month, according to MLS figures supplied by real estate appraiser Maxwell, Hendry & Simmons. It was $1,200 a month in Lee's most affordable area, Lehigh Acres.

"It’s a housing issue, not just an affordable housing issue," said Goodson, whose clients require the maximum allowed extensions to find an affordable unit in Lee.

Carmen Solares, a Lee voucher holder The News-Press reported on who was temporarily homeless while searching for a rental, eventually found one in Fort Myers after a three-month search.

“It’s worse in Collier,” Hentschel said. “People have up to 120 days to find something, and they spend every day trying. Then we lose their voucher.”

Currently, the apartment finder GoSection8.com shows eight affordable units in Collier, most of them at Crestview Park, an affordable housing community near Ave Maria built with private money in exchange for low-income housing tax credits.

Ironically, though few in number, the units priced well below $1,000 a month are more affordable than much of Lee’s Section 8 housing supply.

Collier also has close to 600 affordable units at Farm Workers Village in Immokalee; half dedicated to farm workers, the rest for others whose incomes qualify.

"If we had the funding and space we would love to build more housing," Hentschel said, "but currently there are no grants."

Funding has also put a temporary hold on a 100-unit affordable assisted living project in Lee, where the Oasis at Renaissance Preserve was to be built on land the housing authority owns near Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Michigan Link in Fort Myers.

New assisted living center planned for poor seniors in Fort Myers

“We should have broken ground now, but it’s been pushed to 2017,” Goodson said.

Myths about Section 8

Many people believe housing assistance supports those who would rather take a handout than work.

“My guess would be the vast majority of Section 8 recipients are employed," Goodson said.

Some 18,500 Naples food service workers have full-time incomes that would qualify for Section 8 assistance, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor.

Stuart Melnick, a Naples Realtor who rented to voucher holders until he sold his units a couple of years ago, called his Section 8 tenants “excellent.” One, a single mother, put her daughter through college by working year after year in a day care job with no benefits that regularly laid her off in slow season.

“Sometimes I had to wait for the rent, but she always came through. She was with me for seven years and the unit was cash flow positive,” Melnick said.