By:Angela Marshall
At least one Rockville Centre landlord has decided to exercise the option not to renew the federal government's housing voucher program, which many lower-income families depend on to live on Long Island, where housing is scarce and rents are high.
Diaz and her daughters have lived in their two-bedroom apartment at 18 Jefferson Ave. for two years. A home health-care worker, the single mother depends on the government subsidy to make ends meet.
Fewer and fewer landlords are choosing to participate in the voucher program, according to Margarita Grasing, executive director of the Rockville Centre Hispanic Brotherhood. Many of the affected families are, like Diaz, Hispanic and do not speak English fluently. Many times, Grasing said, they don't know or understand their rights.
Grasing said the Brotherhood often helps people with housing problems and is working to find a solution this time as well. The group held a meeting late last month with the Jefferson Avenue families to try to explain the situation and some of the different options available to them.
"Section 8 housing is going down the drain," Grasing said. "And that's scary, very scary."
Diaz has been searching for an apartment since she got a letter in early May saying that the landlord would not be participating in the Section 8 program. "I cannot find anything," she said through an interpreter. "I'm desperate. Sometimes I can't sleep, thinking where am I going to go. I have no one."
Diaz did find an apartment in Freeport that she could afford, but she is scared to move her daughters there. The day before the interview, a teenager was shot to death there while sitting on her front porch.
Before moving to Rockville Centre, Diaz and her family lived in Baldwin, and she said her younger daughter, Katherine, 12, was having trouble in school. Marie said that since Katherine has been in Rockville Centre schools, there has been a big improvement in her grades. "The school district is so good," she said. "People care so much."
Diaz also found an apartment in Merrick, but it's not legal, and that scares her. For years, low-income families on Long Island have found themselves living in illegal housing, where there is no protection against bad landlords and no guarantee that they won't one day find themselves on the streets.
Kevin Keane, president of Birchwood Equities, the company that owns the Jefferson Avenue apartment building, said he feels for the families. "I don't want to put people in the street," he said. "That's terrible. The people are nice. They're wonderful."
But for Keane, it comes down to dollars and cents. He made an investment in the building two years ago, and it hasn't paid off the way it should have, he said. "I put a lot of money and work into [the building] but [revenues] are not where they should be," he said.
He blamed the need to get rid of the Section 8 program on the disparity between increasing costs for things such as heating fuel and the inability to raise rents to meet those costs. He also said that the effort to meet the rules and regulations of the Section 8 program is taking away time that could be spent on other work that needs to be done.
Keane said he would renew the leases of any Section 8 who can pay the rent without the subsidy, but that he is no longer willing to participate in the program. "We're losing money," he said. "Something's got to be done."
