Clark County has tens of millions of dollars less in rental assistance to help people stay in their homes than in recent years. Amid widespread government deficits, the funding will likely continue to fall — leading to a continued spike in eviction filings and homelessness.
During the pandemic, the federal and Washington governments pumped money into Clark County to keep people housed during a time of sickness, economic hardship and record unemployment.
The county was able to keep thousands housed with the emergency funding. It carried families through a time when Clark County’s median rents jumped about twice as fast as they usually would each year.
As time went on, unemployment rates in the county fell, but rents didn’t.
Clark County went from dishing out $30 million in both 2021 and 2022 to $6.8 million in 2024. The number of households receiving assistance through county funds dropped nearly nine-fold.
With pandemic funds depleted in 2024, the county plans on devoting $2.8 million a year for rental assistance in 2025, 2026 and 2027. (Counties receive funds for homelessness programs from recording fees when people file documents with Washington auditors.)
“The demand has gone up, but public funds have not kept up,” said Katrina Golder, St. Vincent de Paul’s Vancouver conference president.
The nonprofit’s local branch is one of Clark County’s main rental-assistance providers. About once a month, the phones at St. Vincent de Paul ring continuously starting at 10 a.m. Within an hour, the funds are dried up, Golder said.
The people calling are single mothers, elderly victims of scammers, newly jobless parents and people recovering from sickness or hospital stays, she said.
“There’s just so many stories,” Golder said. “It’s really sad when we can’t help.”
About 1 in 10 callers are actively facing eviction, Golder said.
No safety net
During the pandemic, an eviction moratorium combined with an influx of rental assistance kept struggling tenants out of eviction court. Now, Clark County’s court system is overwhelmed.
For the second consecutive year, Clark County had the highest per capita rate of eviction filings of any Washington county in 2024.
Many tenants search for rental assistance before sitting in eviction court but have no luck, said Carl Snodgrass, an attorney with the Northwest Justice Project.
“We’re seeing a growing number of families in our area facing an impossible situation, where they are simply too poor to stay housed, even if they’re working multiple jobs,” Snodgrass said.
Rising evictions have worsened the county’s homelessness crisis, he said. Staff conducting the 2024 Point-in-Time Count found 1,366 homeless people in one day in Clark County, a 5 percent increase from 1,300 the year prior.
Clark County Superior Court has created programs to divert people from homelessness, securing funding for a program called Access to Community Eviction Support in 2023 that can help connect tenants to resources including rental assistance.
The lack of rental-assistance funding has been an issue, said Casey McDougall, a member of the program’s staff. However, people are often able to find some rental assistance through school districts and nonprofits.
Private donations
Local nonprofits, including the Clark County-based Council for the Homeless and St. Vincent de Paul’s Vancouver branch, rely on private donations as well as public funds to give out rental assistance.
St. Vincent de Paul can serve around four to five times as many people in Clark County using its private funds compared with public funds, according to figures given by staff.
“There are a lot of good people in this community,” Golder said.
As time goes on, communities may count on private contributions for rental assistance even more.
The state government is weighing $7 billion in budget cuts. Gov. Bob Ferguson said the state will continue investments in homelessness and housing assistance. However, the Department of Commerce previously estimated a nearly $403 million shortfall for programs including rental assistance due to declining recording fee revenue.
Sunny Wonder, chief operating officer for Council for the Homeless, warns against depending on a private solution for a public problem.
“Every single one of those things that are cut, they’re going to be requests coming for that to private donors,” Wonder said. “I think that there is a danger in relying exclusively on private donations to solve something that is quite big.”
The city of Vancouver receives some money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, but that’s declining, so it has turned to its own source of revenue: a voter-approved property tax levy. The Affordable Housing Fund provides a steady stream of rental assistance to residents.
From 2017 to 2023, the city awarded $1.5 million in rental assistance per year for agencies to distribute. With the levy’s renewal in 2024, the city now allocates $2 million a year.
To slow evictions and homelessness, Clark County needs more and continuous funding for rental assistance, despite the pandemic largely being over, Wonder said.
“The reality is that broad crisis of (rent affordability) in our community remains a really big challenge for us to contend with,” she said.
