I forwarded this movie and here is a reply I got from a friend of mine. She worked in Summit County. The Akron, Ohio area.
Bob
There is a program for political refuges. I have had Serbians, Vietnamese, and other Asians. If they get SSI, it is now about $661 a month. When I first started at AMHA it was $358 a month. This goes to disabled people who do not have enough SS credits to get SSD. At Van Buren I had a family, father was blind, a mother, and an adult son. The father got SSI (around $500 at that time), the wife and adult son nothing. They did get food stamps and medicaid (provided by the state.) Their rent was calculated at 30% of their gross income (not net). They didn't live free. All tenants who pay utilities are given a utility allowance which is deducted from their rent. This enables a larger family on welfare to pay little or no rent. We had many tenants who had used up their welfare benefits and supposedly lived off their utility allowance checks which were suppose to go to pay their gas and electric. They were usually all able to have cable TV (nonworking, drug selling boyfriends who were not on the lease or suppose to be living there). We have 2 recent new housing developments in Akron, Edgewood and Elizabeth Park. The monies to tear down and rebuild came from HUD in a program called Hope VI that AMHA applied for a grant and received. Only about 10-20 grants are given out each year. The cameraman is right to be upset. AMHA doesn't pay taxes, but they own the property not the tenants. Drive around Edgewood and Elizabeth Park (built under a different program with home ownership as part of the program). When I managed Scattered Sites which was houses all over Summit County, I would get a lot of phone calls from neighbors who were upset to see all the monies we put into our houses to rehab them when the tenants had moved out and destroyed our properties (around $50-60K). We had started a program where our houses could only be rented to working tenants in good standing meaning they were current residents living in our apartments, who paid their rent on time, passed all their housekeeping inspections, or were going to school (gov. grants) to better themselves. Many of our working tenants lost their jobs within a short while of moving into a house, and we usually ended up sending them an utility allowance check which could be several hundred dollars a month. You got to know the rules in order to play the game. They were all street smart, and they played to win! And people say to me do I miss working?
|