The Council for the Homeless aims to raise $45,000 to support families at Ghim Village in Hazel Dell, who got vacate notices earlier this week. Many of the renters in this low-cost complex have barriers to getting housing such as prior evictions and felonies. They have until Sept. 30 to find new housing in a strained rental market.
Clark County’s community service department is contributing $25,000. The rest of the money will come from the Housing Relief Fund, said Andy Silver, executive director of the Council for the Homeless. It will cover moving costs, such as application fees and security deposits, or pay off debt that’s keeping people from securing housing.
“The Housing Relief Fund is the Band-Aid. It’s the emergency need approach,” Silver said. “We’re basically trying to do what we did for Courtyard Village again.”
Around Christmastime last year, hundreds of tenants were served with 20-day vacate notices at Courtyard Village Apartments, a low-income complex in Vancouver that wasn’t well-kept. The same property owners and managers that took over Courtyard Village took over Ghim Village this summer. At 55 units, Ghim Village is a smaller complex in an area with high rates of poverty, along with free and reduced lunches at neighboring schools.
The $45,000 was calculated based on what happened at Courtyard Village, taking into account how many families requested help and how much was needed to get them housed.
Half of Ghim Village’s tenants were served with legal notices Tuesday, and the rest are expected to come next month. Children impacted by the notices include 33 Vancouver Public School students at Sarah J. Anderson Elementary and Gaiser Middle schools. The district is holding a meeting for impacted families from 5 to 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at Anderson, 2215 N.E. 10th St. Ghim Village families will get connected with resources to try to make their transition as smooth as possible.
Rents at Ghim Village were $675, though they’ve gone up in the past two months after Seattle-based Madrona Ridge Residential took over property management of the complex. The rent is still well below average, which means those who got the notices will have trouble finding housing in the same price range in Vancouver.
That’s because vacancy rates have dipped down to around 2 percent and average rents have gone up. There’s a financial incentive to flipping rundown rental properties and then renting them out at a higher amount, Silver said.
If the displacement plays out like at Courtyard Village, the tenants will end up scattered around the county or, perhaps, they’ll move outside the county in search of cheaper rent.
“We certainly want to keep people as close to where they’re living as possible,” Silver said.
However, given time and market constraints, most people will take whatever housing they can find, he said.
“As we now know this is not a one-time event. It was never going to be just Courtyard Village. It was never going to be just Ghim Village,” Silver said. He added that the community needs to look at the bigger picture, in terms of increasing the supply of affordable housing.
Those issues are being addressed by the Vancouver City Council, which is doing a reading of three ordinances that would protect vulnerable renters during Monday’s meeting. Ghim Village is in Clark County’s jurisdiction. Although the county does not have its own task force or have any related ordinances on the table, a county representative is keeping abreast of the city’s actions.
