I'm living in the pearl Court Apartments now, another subsidized low-income apartment unit owned by Home Forward in the Pearl District. The Fountain Place Apartments downtown where I used to live is undergoing a seismic upgrade, being one of those ancient unreinforced masonry buildings that like to bury people alive or dead in temblors. The building I'm in now is a modern one and is in some ways better and in some ways worse: the wiring and the flooring and the windows are all better, but the water pressure is crap and the apartment is heated by those grody air vents — plus my bedroom has a brand new carpet that is out-gassing horribly. Also this building is much larger and is dedicated entirely to low-income residents, so it has a different, slightly ghetto institutional feel to it (the Fountain Place was a mixed building, with some market-rate and some subsidized units).
Home sweet home, as is sometimes said; at least for the time being. I'm supposed to return to the Fountain Place Apartments once the renovation of that building is complete, because as a project-based section 8 voucher recipient my rent assistance is tied to the unit I lived in rather than to me as a person. Housing welfare is a mysterious animal compared to food stamps, the only other form of welfare I have experience with. It doesn't help that there's very little transparency or communication offered by those who administer it, and online research has thus far yielded little in the way of comprehensible and useful information. (What most people are familiar with is the housing choice section 8 voucher, which is one where a person can choose where to live — even move out of town or out of state.)
One thing I CAN say for sure is that I'm not looking forward to moving back to the Fountain Place Apartments! Not because of the building itself but because of the process. It took me five weeks to relocate, during which time I was constantly met with arbitrary-seeming bureaucratic demands — and the people who were supposed to be helping me seemed only to render what should have been a straightforward process a muddled anxiety-inducing clusterfuck!
Why was my income eligibility assessed as though I were fresh off the streets instead of being an interim transplant? Because of this, one of my neighbors ended up ineligible to move here because she earned too much, even though her income level was acceptable in the old building (different units and different buildings have different income eligibility caps, usually 40% or 60% or 80% of the area median income; though after you've moved in you're usually allowed to earn 140% of the maximum income you were allowed to earn to be eligible to move in). And why was I initially deemed ineligible to move here because I'm in the midst of legal proceedings, even though I haven't been convicted of anything yet? Is this how insurance companies circumvent presumption of innocence? And then there was the whole headache regarding reporting my income as a delivery courier for Postmates and Uber Eats! To verify my income for the purpose of proving that I'm eligible to move into a tax credit-funded low-income housing unit, I ended up submitting Schedule C from the 1040 tax form and all of my bank statements for the entire year; whereas if I had simply had an hourly-wage job all I would have had to submit would have been my W-2s or pay stubs!
And the question remains: will I even be returning to the Fountain Place Apartments? It's not outside of the realm of possibility, that Home Forward may sell the property. Actually the big question for me, and for everyone else receiving rent assistance, is just what the future has in store for housing welfare in this country? A lot of Americans hate us welfare recipients and want to all but obliterate social safety nets, even though for a single person earning minimum wage to afford the average rent of $1,482 for a one-bedroom apartment in Portland he'd have to work ninety hours a week! (This is based on housing costs being 35% of one's budget.)
It's not the Big One I'm afraid of, nor am I afraid of getting stricken down by the coronavirus. It's not even some sketchy tweaker neighbor setting the building on fire or nutting up on me with a knife ... shit, I'm not even afraid of four more years of Donald Trump! What scares me are the boorish assholes living down the street with ballots in one hand and ignorant hatred for victims of runaway capitalism in the other!
