D.C. Latino History Project / History/Housing/Vivienda / Special Issue

Home Sweet Hogar: Additional Resources for finding Affordable Housing

By hola | Published August 30, 2015 | No Comments

Finding a casa to call home sweet home…

→ Where to look for affordable housing now?

→ What if your building is being sold?

→ If your tenant association buys your building, what happens next?

Here are some resources that can help with these and other questions.

If you are looking for affordable housing

DC Housing Search (www.DCHousingSearch.org) is a free online housing locator service. Unlike Craigslist or Apartments.com, DC Housing Search is specifically for people looking for low-cost homes. Its listings include both government-funded and privately owned properties.

The search tool allows users to filter housing options by several factors, including number of bedrooms, price limitations, zip code, and access to public transit. There’s even an advice column on the ‘Tools and Resources’ page for both landlords and tenants.

Finding the right resources is an important part to finding affordable housing with good living conditions. But it all depends on knowing about and successfully navigating available programs despite obstacles such as the language barrier facing many Latino residents, says Jackie Reyes, the director of the Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs.

“It all depends if you know about those things,” Reyes says. “I’m always referring people to that website—case managers, nonprofits. You just have to know it exists.”

So far, however, DCHousingSearch.org is yet to become as widely used as Craigslist or other popular apartment listing sites. It is relatively new so its listings are limited. But as more people discover its usefulness, more property owners will add their apartment listings, predicts Beth Leysieffer, communications director at Socialserve, a non-profit organization that created the website. Below are images of the DC Housing Search tool user interface.

Find out more at www.dchousingsearch.org.

If your rent is going up or you have to move

The veteran D.C. Latino advocacy organization, Carecen, has a housing department that helps residents in need of housing.

Among its other services, Carecen, or the Central American Resource Center, provides free counseling, training and rental assistance for Latinos in the D.C. area. When people come to the organization for assistance, Carecen staff helps them contact property owners or get on waiting lists for available properties.

“We have a DHCD (Department of Housing and Community Development) list of projects that are completed or under construction, so we have that info,” says Carecen’s housing director Anabell Martinez. “We send people to apply to those places.”

Martinez and Carecen housing counselor Michael Garcia say, as rental prices skyrocket in Ward 1, they are seeing more Latino residents who need help finding new apartments.

Martinez says she often has to break the news to longtime Ward 1 residents that there are no longer any apartments in their price range in the entire ward, which includes Adams Morgan, Mount Pleasant and Columbia Heights. While Martinez and Garcia can usually find housing their clients can afford in other parts of the District, people are extremely reluctant to move so far from their long time homes in traditionally Latino neighborhoods, they say.

Garcia says lately he’s been able to find people affordable apartments in Wards 6, 7 and 8. But those districts come with their own sets of problems such as higher rates of street crime and fewer restaurants and stores—often no Latino groceries at all.

To contact Carecen, visit their website at www.carecendc.org or call 202-328-9799.

If you want a stronger cooperative

Free training workshops for people who have recently formed tenant’s associations take place once every other month at Mi Casa, a local affordable housing developer with a long history of partnership with the Latino community.

The Saturday morning trainings cover topics such as how to supervise building management companies; how to request building maintenance and repairs; understanding financial reports; communicating effectively with a building’s residents; and how to detangle the red tape surrounding building ownership.

“It’s mainly to help people understand the process of running a cooperative. They have to be informed about what they will have to deal with. Basically any aspect of the cooperative that they would need to know to run it, we have workshops about,” says Mi Casa program associate Katy Argueta, who added that the program is open to any cooperative member, not just board members.

Sign up for a workshop here. Mi Casa offers the workshops in English and Spanish.

If you need assistance navigating the TOPA process

The Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act, or TOPA, allows residents living in buildings governed by the District’s rent control regulations to have a say in what happens to their building when the owner puts the property up for sale. The idea is to allow tenants to either buy the building themselves or find a third-party purchaser that they approve of. In today’s high-priced real estate market, however, TOPA has a growing number of critics who say the law doesn’t always lead to positive outcomes for tenants.

The process can take more than a year and involves various legal documents. Luckily, several D.C. nonprofits exist to help tenants with every step. Tenants should know that they are not alone, says Robert Wohl, a tenant organizer at the Latino Economic Development Center, one of advocacy organizations that help low-income tenants through the TOPA process.

“Usually, we come in when tenants are finding out that their buildings are for sale,” he says. “In those circumstances, we’ll help tenants form an organization and then we submit the necessary documentation to initiate the process of TOPA. Then, we’ll connect them with other players who can help them.”

“It’s not just tenants on their own taking over and managing a building,” Wohl says.

To contact LEDC, visit www.ledcmetro.org or call 202-588-5102.