Steve Gold, The Disability Odyssey continues

Many housing advocates for people with disability look only to HUD (vouchers, HOME, CDBG, public housing) or IRS (Low-income housing tax credits) for housing. In this Information Bulletin, we look at the U.S. Department of Agriculture for housing. While the USDA provides funding for home owners and single family housing, we're going to look only at rental housing for multiple-family housing.

The USDA funds both capital costs to construct/ rehabilitate and also rental assistance, so that low income persons can afford to rent the units.

The USDA "Rental Assistance" program provides rental subsidies - "housing vouchers" - to those units that it has funded with capital funds. These rental subsidies are just like HUD's project-based vouchers; they go with the USDA rental unit b not with the individual. If a person is lucky enough to reside in a USDA multifamily "rental assistance" unit, like HUD's vouchers, the person pays only a portion of the rent and the USDA "rental assistance" subsidizes the rest of the rent.

In FY 2006, the USDA provided new Rental Assistance awards for nearly 42,000 units, which was in addition to the many existing units that also receive USDA Rental Assistance.

As of 9/30/07, nearly 60% (266,228) of the USDA total multifamily rental units (441,534) receive "Rental Assistance" subsidies.

Below we provide by State a breakdown of the total number of USDA rental assistance properties the number of Rental Assistance units (i.e., those with project-based subsidies) out of the total number of USDA funded rental units.

To find the city and street address of the USDA properties in your State with both the specific number of units and the specific number that receives rental assistance, go to www.nhtinc.org, click on subsidized housing data, then go to your State and click on USDA Section 515.

These USDA units must comply with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and must have at least five percent of their units accessible for people with a mobility disability and another one percent for visual and for hearing disabilities. People who require the accessible features should be residing in those units.

Advocates should know where these properties are located, how many units in each property receives a "Rental Assistance" subsidy, and whether Section 504 has been complied with.

The first column of numbers lists the total number of properties in the USDA "Multifamily Housing Portfolio." The second column lists the number of units in the properties that receive a "Rental Assistance" (i.e., rental subsidy), and the third column lists the total number of USDA units in all the properties.

Alabama .....................480 USDA multifamily properties .........have 8,025 units receiving "Rental Assistance" out of a total 15,789 USDA multifamily units in the state.

Alaska .......................39 USDA multifamily properties ............have 813 units receiving "Rental Assistance" out of a total of 894 USDA multifamily units in the state.

Arizona .....................117 USDA multifamily properties .......have 3,175 units receiving "Rental Assistance" out of a total 3712

USDA multifamily units in the state:

Here are two web links that will help you locate USDA multifamily units in your State:

• USDA and the Rural Housing Service have a very good link for locating multifamily USDA developments in a town or zip code.
• They also have state maps for county-by-county searches.