New pilot program aims to help unhoused Tacoma students access affordable housing
Tacoma students experiencing homelessness may soon get housing help thanks to a new local partnership.
In a joint news release, Tacoma Housing Authority and Tacoma Public Schools announced that they’ve teamed up to prioritize unhoused families who have students in the district. The pair is locking arms to create a “local waitlist preference” that will extend housing-program access to vulnerable residents.
TPS leads the state in the number of students experiencing homelessness, said Fernando Ruiz, Tacoma Housing Authority’s associate director of rental assistance. Early June is the soonest that he expects to see referrals from Tacoma Public Schools. Some 2,659 Tacoma students are either unstably housed or homeless — up from 2,382 students last April.
More than 400 of these kids are unaccompanied, meaning they don’t live with a parent or guardian, according to THA.
“Tacoma Housing Authority is really focused on housing stability, because it’s important not only to house people, but to keep the people housed,” Ruiz told The News Tribune.
The school district will refer qualifying contenders to the housing authority’s waitlist. From there the applicants will be offered a THA-housing resource, something that’s “conditioned on the continued availability of funds from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and THA’s voucher utilization needs,” according to the news release.
Pierce County logged a spike in people experiencing homelessness in 2023, The News Tribune previously reported. The U.S. recently counted the highest recorded level of unhoused folks since federal officials first started keeping tabs in 2007.
Ruiz stressed that the new partnership won’t affect residents on THA’s current waitlist, who “will still be served in a timely manner.”
A lack of affordable housing has contributed to homelessness in Tacoma, he said. Low-income people or those who are unemployed often face housing challenges — but so do workers whose wages no longer keep up with today’s rents.
“So it’s very important for us to step in when we’re able to create these programs to assist Tacoma families when they need it the most,” Ruiz said.
Tacoma Public Schools helps to pick eligible applicants who can benefit from the program, said Taj Jensen, director of the district’s Title I, LAP and McKinney-Vento Services. Next TPS shepherds those applicants through the process, including by helping to set up appointments and decipher lease terms.
The district also acts as a liaison between the housing authority and landlords to check that tenants are living up to the lease agreements, he said. TPS makes sure that people know how to access mental-health counseling and financial-literacy support: “We kind of point them in the right direction and help them get acquainted with those resources.”
Some people who now qualify for assistance are newly unhoused, he said. They may even be dual-income families who can no longer afford to keep a roof over their heads because of rising rents.
The goal of the district’s partnership with THA is to be proactive in keeping at-risk families in homes, Jensen said.
“It’s a lot easier to do that work up front and keep families housed, as they have a line of credit, they have an income and they’re still on their feet, per se,” he said. “And so this is a preventative measure to catch people before they fall too far.”
When a student experiences homelessness, it can be a “pretty traumatic event” for them, Jensen said. It could stunt certain brain developments, such as how to regulate emotions, and inhibit one’s ability to engage in learning.
Being unhoused can also hamper students’ social, emotional and academic growth, he said. That burden may then be felt on campus and could have “a lasting impact on the school community as a whole.
“We have families that are in tents, that are in streets, that live in Swan Creek,” Jensen continued. “I mean, you name it: Our families are experiencing it.”
The district has previously worked with Catholic Community Services and Associated Ministries to rehouse up to 40 families in a year, Jensen added. He noted that the THA-TPS partnership is just a pilot program.
“We’ve never done this before,” he said. “So if we can get 10 families in a given year rehoused, that would be success.”
This story was originally published April 5, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
