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City's Section 8 dilemma A.V. needs extra investigator, Gilley says By Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer Wednesday, June 30, 2004 - LANCASTER -- City officials are offering to help pay for an additional county housing investigator to deal with an influx of people using governmental rent subsidies to rent Antelope Valley apartments and homes. Of 67 apartments and rental homes checked in the first three months of a new sheriff's unit concentrating on rental-property crime, officials found that 42 violated regulations for the so-called Section 8 rent subsidies -- mostly extra people living there or illegal weapons or drug possession. "We are a victim of other agencies that do a crappy job of screening tenants and they end up in Lancaster," City Manager James Gilley said. In the past three years, Los Angeles County officials say, the number of families in Lancaster, Palmdale and elsewhere in the Antelope Valley receiving Section 8 rental subsidies jumped from 2,100 to 3,400 -- or about 3 percent of the valley population. One-half to two-thirds of the increase was attributed to families moving into the Antelope Valley, officials said. City officials, Gilley said, want Los Angeles County to add another investigator for the Antelope Valley to "ferret out people not eligible for that kind of assistance and get them the heck out of here," Gilley said. Many problem Section 8 tenants transferred with rental subsidies to the Antelope Valley from Los Angeles, where a top county housing official said city officials had not been checking applicants' claims they had no criminal background, officials said. Problems are also caused by unauthorized tenants living in Section 8 recipients' homes, officials said. "A lot of the time they're trying to do a good thing: their nephew from South Central is getting in trouble so they send him up here. He rewards them by continuing his gang activity," Lancaster sheriff's station commander Capt. Carl Deeley said. With serious crime up 26 percent since 1999, Lancaster officials' main anti-crime effort -- partly financed by a business fee imposed last year on landlords -- is focusing on apartments and rental housing. City and sheriff's officials are quick to point out they don't regard every renter as a criminal. Only a fraction of renters is causing problems, and many of the victims are fellow tenants, Deeley said. "They are basically held hostage in some of these apartment projects," Deeley said. But officials also say an analysis last year of crime statistics showed that 64 percent of the city's crimes occurred around apartment complexes and in neighborhoods with a large proportion of rental housing, even though those areas contained about 39 percent of the population. Advocates for the poor say Los Angeles is doing its own crackdown on Section 8 recipients. They fear that such efforts will lead landlords to stop taking Section 8 vouchers and that tenants will have no option but homeless shelters. "Housing is hard enough to find," said welfare organizer Christine Jones of ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, in Los Angeles. "It takes $3,000 to move into a two-bedroom apartment. They don't have that kind of money." At a breakfast meeting Wednesday between Lancaster City Council members and Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, Gilley said the Section 8 situation is serious enough to require the immediate addition of a second housing investigator for the valley. If necessary, the city is willing to split the cost of adding another investigator, Gilley said. "Why don't we pursue that," Antonovich said. Bobbette Glover, Los Angeles County Community Development Commission assistant executive director, was also at the meeting, and calls the cost-sharing proposal "a workable solution." Besides having one of its six investigators assigned full time to the Antelope Valley, the county has a fraud analyst in the valley, Glover said. Section 8 housing vouchers go to more than 40,000 households in the city of Los Angeles alone, and to tens of thousands more in smaller cities and unincorporated communities in Los Angeles County. Section 8 recipients pay about 30 percent of their monthly income for rent, with the rest of their landlord's standard rent charge paid by the federal government. Section 8 recipients can take their eligibility with them when they move anywhere in the United States, said Glover. "Someone can take a voucher from Los Angeles County and move to Hawaii," Glover said. Federal Housing and Urban Development officials officials have recently said it is acceptable for the county housing agency to check for criminal backgrounds among subsidy recipients transferring from other jurisdictions, Glover said. There is disagreement among federal officials about that, however, so the situation might change again, Glover said. County housing officials also said they are facing cutbacks in funding. Federal officials have warned them that their Section 8 funding would be cut $9 million. That leaves no money for hiring more investigators, they said, but it also means that there will be no additional vouchers issued. "It's going to severely impact how we do business," Glover said of the impending cuts. 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