The George Washington Regional Commission applied for a $460,000 grant on behalf of the Fredericksburg Continuum of Care to help low-income individuals facing evictions.
In the 2020 special session, the Virginia General Assembly passed a budget allocating $3.3 million to implement the Virginia Eviction Reduction Pilot (VERP) with the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) directed to design and implement the pilot.
As part of VERP, the grant will allow CoC to fund programs with partners Loisann’s Hope House and Legal Aid Works that aim to prevent evictions and stabilize housing for those in need.
Under current law, if a landlord wants to evict someone for not paying rent, they must provide a written notice to either move or pay rent in five days. This is sometimes called a “pay or quit” notice. If the rent isn’t paid, the landlord can file an unlawful detainer action in general district court.
VERP aims to reduce the number of those detainers from turning into evictions and keep people from becoming homeless.
GWRC’s CoC has been running an eviction working group for over a year and will expand its membership to include key decision makers in the community, like court judges, said Housing and Community Health Program Director Sam Shoukas.
There are four prongs to the program: Eviction diversion, eviction prevention, court navigation and system partnerships. She noted that GWRC will see very little of the grant funds, because most of it will go to those system partnerships.
“The majority of those funds will go towards Loisann’s Hope House and Legal Aid Works if we are awarded. It’s a little over $100,000 for Legal Aid Works and that’s mostly for another court attorney and two paralegals,” she said.
At Monday night’s GWRC board meeting, Shoukas noted that there is only one Legal Aid Works housing attorney working evictions in the region.
“Currently Legal Aid Works has been doing some court navigation for our area, but they actually cover 17 localities in Virginia,” Shoukas said. “And so for our area, it only comes out to one housing attorney that’s able to support our region. On average, a housing attorney can support about 40 to 50 eviction cases at a time.”
Shoukas said the average number of evictions monthly is around 400. “So, we have another 350-plus folks who are being evicted without support. And currently there are no other funds in our community that provide rental assistance.”
The VERP program also aims to educate tenants and landlord about their rights, including how to pay off arrears and mitigate evictions.
“We are really trying to catch people earlier, upstream, before they become homeless…. and also, for those landlords, we want those affordable housing units in our community and we want people in that housing.”
Shoukas said Loisann’s Hope House will use its share of the funds to hire a case manager and administer rental assistance, childcare costs, transportation, utilities and other financial needs that can help prevent evictions from happening.
Helping low-income individuals stay in a home is a priority for the CoC and those in the community working to prevent homelessness, said Shoukas, even if they don’t get the grant.
“We are going to continue this conversation … through our evictions working group,” she said. “How we address the issue of evictions in our community is always something that we’re looking for with or without the funding.”
