LEBANON — City officials are looking to partner with Upper Valley nonprofit organizations to house people who have been living in hotel rooms paid through the federal Emergency Rental Assistance program now that the program is slated to end next month.
Lebanon and municipalities around New Hampshire also are seeking the state’s assistance to help shoulder the additional burden placed on cities and towns now that the federal program is ending. New Hampshire law — RSA 165 — requires that municipalities support people who cannot support themselves.
“There’s no set end date for anybody,” Lynne Goodwin, Lebanon’s human services director, said in an interview last week, as long as they’re “doing what they can to find housing.”
While the city has been able to negotiate a lower nightly rate with the hotels than the federal program had been paying, it still totals about $5,000 per month per household. At the same time, Lebanon officials also are hearing from households that had been receiving rental assistance through ERAP and now are seeking assistance from the city to stay in their homes.
“We are looking at it case by case knowing how hard it is to find alternative housing,” Goodwin said. “… It depends on the household’s income and their ability to be self-sustaining in the future.”
City officials are frustrated that the federal assistance — which statewide totals $250 million and in Grafton County totals $18.3 million — wasn’t put to better use by creating more affordable housing and shelters, Goodwin said. While the ERAP program did not require that participants contribute to their housing costs, the city requires that households contribute at least 30% of their income toward their shelter, she said.
“It feels like it was a Band-Aid, and it just got ripped off,” she said.
As a result of the costs the city now faces, Goodwin and City Manager Shaun Mulholland told the City Council during a budget session on Thursday that they expect the Human Services Department, which consists of Goodwin and an assistant, to overspend its budget by the end of the year. They could not yet say by how much.
The department’s 2022 budget is $554,900, including $95,000 for rental assistance. Next year the department is asking for $582,130, including a $10,000 increase for rental assistance.
On Thursday, Goodwin told the council she had received a list of people staying at the hotels from Tri-County Community Action, which administers the ERAP program in conjunction with New Hampshire Housing. The list included 46 households staying at the Quality Inn on Route 120 and 16 staying at the Sunset Motor Inn off Route 10 in West Lebanon. The list did not include residency information, so it was not clear how many of them had been living in Lebanon prior to their hotel stays.
If just 20 of those were in Lebanon before they entered the hotels and if the city needs to house them just for this month, it would cost $100,000, exhausting the department’s budget, Goodwin told the council.
In an effort to address the rising cost to the city without raising more money from taxes, Mulholland said he will ask the council next month to approve a non-lapsing revolving fund of $100,000 that he has set aside from other parts of the city budget.
“We’ve got to do something ourselves to develop a reserve,” he said. “… Temperatures are already cold out there. It’s going to get colder.”
In addition, Goodwin is working to contract with Listen on a transitional housing pilot project to rent a Lebanon apartment for households to stay in while they look for permanent housing. The aim is to get that project up and running by January, she said, noting that the cost of $25,000 to rent an apartment is less than half of the $5,000 per month per household the city would pay to house them in hotels.
It’s “such a unique time, and the needs in the community are so dire,” Angela Zhang, Listen’s program director, said in a Tuesday phone interview. Listen has been looking at “what are any possible solutions that we can find to help meet the need?”
Ideally households would stay in the apartment, which is owned by West Lebanon-based landlord Patrick Flanagan, for 30-60 days before moving into permanent housing with the help of Listen’s community social worker. To qualify, households must be Lebanon residents who are currently homeless; some may be families or living with chronic diseases that can make it even more difficult to find permanent housing, she said.
In another effort, Goodwin said the city aims to book a block of 10 rooms at one of the hotels and partner with the Upper Valley Haven to provide services to the people staying there for two months this winter. If the Haven provides one hour a week of assistance per household, that will be “more than folks have been receiving for the last year,” she said.
The Haven has already been providing similar support to people living in hotels on the Vermont side of the Upper Valley, Michael Redmond, the Haven’s executive director, said in a Tuesday phone interview.
“It’s a model that we’re used to,” he said. “We understand how to get the best out of it.”
Given that New Hampshire’s ERAP program is ending at the end of December and Vermont’s is slated to end at the end of March, there’s “some urgency to try to get people linked to the services that can help them with that transition,” Redmond said, noting that they are doing so amid a “very tough housing market.”
Goodwin also has been keeping her eye out for a property in downtown Lebanon that could serve as a low-barrier shelter but has so far been unable to locate a suitable parcel.
“I think it’s pretty hopeless to come up with anything for a low-barrier shelter location,” she said at last week’s meeting of the prospect of finding a spot for a shelter this winter. She continues to look.
Mulholland noted that the hotel program is the “least efficient” and “most costly way of doing it.”
With all the money that has gone toward housing people in hotels, “we could have built a shelter,” Mulholland said in a Monday interview. “Then we would have a permanent structure.”
Meanwhile, Mayor Tim McNamara is seeking a meeting with state officials in an effort to get state funding to support emergency rental assistance, as well as heating assistance.
“This week it’s going to obviously get really cold,” Mulholland said. The “present amount for heating assistance just not going to be enough.”
The City Council is slated to discuss establishing the revolving loan fund at its Dec. 7 meeting.
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
CLARIFICATION: Lebanon Human Services Director Lynne Goodwin is searching for a location for a low-barrier shelter in downtown Lebanon for the future. A story in Wednesday’s VALLEY NEWS did not make it clear that Goodwin was still looking.
