Dena Levitz, The Examiner
2006-09-20 09:00:00.0
Current rank: # 2,755 of 1,248

Montgomery County -

Montgomery County low-income residents who didn’t get a chance to apply for the housing choice voucher program have the next two weeks to apply for the county’s public housing program.

As with the Housing and Urban Development’s voucher system, the county will come up with a waiting list and, at some undetermined date, hold a lottery to randomly select program recipients.

And, as has been the case with the voucher system, thousands of applicants are expected to compete for only a few hundred spots, Housing Opportunities Commission spokeswoman Susan Krimer Yancy said.

The problem is that the need to provide affordable housing in Montgomery County — overall one of the wealthiest counties in the nation — has steadily climbed the past several years, while federal funding for housing assistance has remained virtually the same, Yancy said.

“We have a set number we’re allowed by HUD and that number has not increased since 1997,” Yancy said.

For example, when the waiting list opened for the housing choice voucher program last month, a record-breaking 17,800 residents signed on. With the Public Housing program, there’s no concrete way to know how many people will apply, but that the number should be high, Yancy said.

Overall, Montgomery County has only 1,550 units reserved for the program with 99 percent of these units currently filled, she noted.

According to HUD, the main difference between the housing choice voucher and public housing programs is the housing itself. Voucher recipients can pick their own homes so long as the rental costs fall within the acceptable range; Public housing recipients, meanwhile, stay in preselected apartments owned by the county.

The income ceilings in the county are $31,600 for a single resident, $36,100 for a family of two and $40,650 for a family of three.

dlevitz@dcexaminer.com