The pandemic has been difficult for everyone, but over the past year, the Mountaineer Rental Assistance Program has made millions of dollars available to West Virginians to help with rent and utilities. But there are still millions of dollars going unspent.
The pandemic has been difficult for everyone, but over the past year, the Mountaineer Rental Assistance Program has made millions of dollars available to West Virginians to help with rent and utilities. But there are still millions of dollars going unspent.
Jessica Greathouse is the special programs manager for The Mountaineer Rental Assistance Program. The program helps renters in West Virginia who have had a financial hardship during the pandemic by paying up to 18 months of their past rent and utilities.
“West Virginia had to build its program from scratch,” Greathouse said. “So from writing the policies and procedures to hiring staff, we’ve been up and running now for almost a year.”
Congress appropriated more than $21 billion for programs like this in every state.
After a year of being operational, The Mountaineer Rental assistance program is finding its legs.
“March was by far our best month since the program’s inception,” Greathouse said. “We’re close to about $81 million total in the year the program has existed, and we are continuing to pay out applications.”
So it came as a shock to many earlier this year when the U.S. Treasury Department started clawing back rental assistance money from states like West Virginia. West Virginia started with $200 million, but the feds took back more than $40 million to give to other states that could use it.
The West Virginia Housing Development Fund, which oversees the Mountaineer Rental Assistance Program, said there were reasons why West Virginia couldn’t spend all the money. For one, the funds were administered on the basis of population, not retentership. According to U.S. Census data, West Virginia has the highest rate of home ownership in the country.
West Virginia was far from alone in its fate.Treasury documents show that the department took back over $450 million from states and local governments across the country.
But from running the program herself, Greathouse said the need is still there.
“It is clear through the application pipeline and the calls that come in that there is a huge rentership need in West Virginia,” she said.
High Need, Low Awareness
Housing and elected officials want this money in the hands of West Virginia renters, but renters have to prove they’re in need. Housing advocates say the application process has been clunky at times.
“I did notice that some of my clients had problems in the portal,” said Cassidy Thompson, the emergency rental assistance program director for the West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness.
Thompson works with those most in need of this assistance, focusing on people facing eviction or homelessness.
“It is a little confusing if you don’t know what you’re doing and if you’re not super tech savvy,” she said. “But I also understand that this is the circumstances of public health.”
Technology can often end up being a barrier instead of the tool it intends to be when applicants lack internet access or even web-enabled devices.
But Greathouse said the system has listened and adapted to speed up approval time. The number of workers available to answer questions and facilitate applications has increased, as have efforts through community partners like Thompson’s at the Coalition to End Homelessness.
“We’re getting much faster at processing applications,” she said. “We have more than 150 people working at any given time on the processing and approval of applications.”
One of the biggest remaining issues the program has run into is awareness. Not just awareness that the program is happening, but also of eligibility, said Thompson.
“A lot of people are assuming that they just might not meet the qualifications so that they won’t be eligible, but the income limit is really high. You would be surprised,” she said.
Income eligibility is on a county by county basis, but is higher than many might realize. In Monongalia County, for example, a single person would qualify for assistance with an annual income below $41,000. With more people in the household, that amount goes up.
People can still apply, even if they have already been approved once. The federal deadline for states to spend the money is in September.
“The Mountaineer Rental Assistance Program has still had plenty of money to spend. We want people to continue making applications,” Greathouse said.
Eventually the funds will run out, but Greathouse said the Housing Development Fund is already working to create a more permanent system of eviction diversion and emergency assistance to help West Virginians for years to come.
A home repair program in Huntington that brings nationwide volunteers together with hometown groups continues to grow on several levels.
A home repair program in Huntington that brings nationwide volunteers together with hometown groups continues to grow on several levels.
Huntington’s successful Project Shine program served 101 homes in three neighborhoods last year. This year, the program is going city wide. The free housing rehabilitation program provides qualified homeowners with minor home exterior repairs including siding, gutters and windows along with accessibility upgrades like wheelchair ramps and safety additions such as security lighting and weatherization.
Project Shine coordinator Ben Newhouse said more than 1400 youth and adult volunteers from four workgroups across the country will partner with local churches,nonprofits and public schools. He said residents get housing upgrades, young people will learn skills and West Virginia becomes a showcase.
“Kids learn skills when they build and work on homes,This will never be taken away from them,” Newhouse said. “They can pick up a hammer, work on stairs or porches, whatever. Some of them come back to vacation and maybe hopefully go to school here at Marshall or another institution in the area.”
Newhouse said there are numerous work groups across the country that want to get out again and help now that COVID-19 restrictions are lifting. He said there are many groups and resources that could help other towns and counties across West Virginia. Several versions of Project Shine are underway throughout the state.
For more information on how you or your community might get involved, email projectshine@huntingtonwv.gov.
Meteorologists are predicting anywhere from one to seven inches of snow and wintry mix across the state tonight and into Saturday. The storm is a stark reminder of the dangers unhoused West Virginians face even as the region inches into Spring.
Community members in Morgantown have been gathering coats, sleeping bags and heaters for those who will be on the streets during the big storm.
Folks can get out of the cold and stay in the city’s warming shelter. But with space for just 28 people, housing advocates like Morgantown city council member Brian Butcher say it’s not enough to meet the community’s needs during this type of weather event.
“It’s heartwarming, and it’s amazing the level of support that people can get throughout our community,” Butcher said. “That level of support should not be required. In my opinion, we should have a structure upon which we could get people in housing during the winter, you know, even just a temporary shelter.”
Butcher spoke as part of a forum on warming shelters and winter resources hosted by the League of Women Voters of Morgantown and Monongalia County Thursday night, during which advocates discussed needed improvements in the city and state’s response to housing issues.
Executive director of Milan Puskar Health Right Laura Jones said that a single shelter is inadequate. Some people may not want to use a particular shelter for a variety of reasons.
“Those folks are always out there, there are always people that have difficulty with the rules or with the structure of the shelter,” Jones said. “It would be even better if we had an alternate space for people who don’t feel comfortable going to the current shelter.”
Temperatures are expected to drop into the 20s Friday night and continue to drop into the low teens Sunday morning.
There were more than 580,000 people experiencing homelessness in the United States in 2020. That estimate exists because each year, the federal government requires all states, including West Virginia, to count the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night.
The night of January 26 was one of the coldest of the year so far at just 16 degrees. In Morgantown, volunteers met around 9 p.m. outside the Morgantown Public Library to conduct the annual Point in Time Count, a survey of all homeless and unhouse people in the country.
Annie McVay describes who exactly she’s looking for.
“Homeless… meaning they have like nowhere else to go, they can’t safely couch hop, they wouldn’t be able to just crash with a friend for the night. Like they’ve literally nowhere else to go other than the street,” she said.
McVay is a case manager with Bartlett Housing Solutions, a nonprofit that strives to provide permanent housing, as well as emergency shelter, in Morgantown.
Volunteers broke up into three teams, each covering a section of downtown Morgantown from Sunnyside to South High Street.
To provide the Department of Housing and Urban Development with an accurate count of people experiencing homelessness, volunteers conduct short surveys. They collect demographic information, such as race and gender, names, ages, and most importantly where the person plans to sleep that night.
The data directly influences the funding organizations like Bartlett House receive.
West Virginia’s counts have been trending down from a high of about 2,400 unhoused individuals in 2012 to 1,300 in 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a normal count aided by volunteers was not carried out in 2021, so this year’s count will provide better numbers.
However, single-digit temperatures made the already difficult task of finding people that often don’t want to be found that much harder. McVay saw nobody.
“I think I was a little surprised by how many people I didn’t see. I thought I would definitely see at least one person out. And I mean, I went under the bridges. We went under the bridges and didn’t see anyone there,” McVay said.
“So that was pretty surprising because in the summers when I’ve gone out, they are packed full. In the winter, obviously people are going to try to get inside as much as they can. But I did not realize that many people will be getting in and out of the cold.”
Housing advocates say winter is not the best time to count. They end up finding fewer people and that results in an under-allocation of resources.
“It’s a national count and so we have the same date as California does as Arkansas does. And that’s not something that we control, that’s not something that is really, honestly beneficial for us in this state,” said West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness Community Relations Director Ellie Johnson.
The West Virginia Coalition to End Homelessness organizes the count in 44 of West Virginia’s 55 counties, covering most of the state except the areas around Charleston, Huntington, and Wheeling.
Johnson says a winter count does take a snapshot of those who are chronically homeless, but it doesn’t accurately count those who go back and forth between secure housing.
“We all have that southern hospitality in certain parts of the state, right? So someone’s gonna say ‘It’s cold outside, Jimmy. Come in, you can sleep on my couch,’ you know, for this night. But if you’re over the age of 24, sleeping on someone’s couch doesn’t make you eligible as homeless according to HUD standards. So it really does take away our ability to really count them as homeless for that night,” Johnson said.
The pandemic has further complicated the count, and therefore estimates of homelessness across the country.
Back outside the public library at 10:30pm, the Morgantown volunteers do a quick debrief. The temperature had dropped to 11 degrees, and would continue to fall as low as 2 by morning. Almost all of the volunteers that came out in Morgantown work in some capacity to shelter or otherwise help the unhoused access resources.
West Virginia University nursing student Carley LaPole was part of the group that managed to survey six individuals in downtown Morgantown.
“It was very eye opening. My feet are frozen, and I’ve been out here for less than two hours. So my heart just breaks because some of them have been out here for years, months. And they don’t have anywhere else to go,” she said.
Working alongside Carly was Michael McCawley, a clinical associate professor at WVU’s School of Public Health.
“The most unfortunate thing was it’s just Wednesday. It’s another night. It’s not unlike any other night you might be out here. You’ll see people out in weather, it’s very cold. And they’re very unsheltered,” McCawley said.
“The lucky ones have some cardboard to put over them. The unlucky ones are going to keep walking until the sun comes up. And there are places where they can go inside, get a cup of coffee, get warm for a while.”
It may be another night, as McCawley said, but the information he helped collect will give advocates for the unhoused the funds and data to provide housing and healthcare for some of West Virginia’s most vulnerable.
Joe Oliver and Tony Brown peered into the dark crawl space beneath a Letcher County, Kentucky, home. Already, they could see problems. The crawl space had been blocked off with just a thin sheet of plywood; the posts supporting the house rested on uneven blobs of poured concrete; the whole place reeked of mold.
A gas leak detector beeped urgently at the meeting of two pipes.
Crawling on elbows and knees, ducking to avoid exposed pipes, Oliver and Brown found flood damage, poor ductwork, and one very large spider.
Later, the pair hauled themselves into the homeowner’s attic, appalled at the poor craftsmanship. A flimsy internal door was all that stood between insulated space and an unsealed attic. This homeowner was likely wasting a huge amount of electricity.
Credit Sydney Boles / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Energy auditors assess a Letcher County, Ky., home.
“I’d say this is about average for houses around here,” Brown said.
Brown and Oliver were conducting a home energy audit for the Appalachia HEAT Squad, a program through the nonprofit Fahe. The program helps homeowners and renters lower utility bills through energy efficiency upgrades.
“We’ve seen housing built without proper beams, foundations, ventilation,” Oliver said, “just numerous issues construction-wise.”
Stagnating incomes and high unemployment have left many in rural Appalachia struggling to cover basic expenses. Housing is no exception. Recent research from the Pew Charitable Trusts found that although prohibitive housing costs are thought of as an urban problem, rural Americans are fast catching up.
A person is considered cost-burdened when rent or mortgage costs exceed 30 percent of that person’s income. A person is considered severely cost burdened when those costs exceed 50 percent of income.
The data show 40 counties in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia where the percent of severely cost-burdened homes increased from 2010 to 2017, and more than half of those are rural counties. Nearly a quarter of the region’s rural counties (23 percent) experienced increases in severely cost-burdened households, far higher than the rate of all counties when more urban areas are included.
In Letcher County, 12.6 percent of homeowners are considered severely housing cost-burdened, up from 8.3 percent in 2010.
A significant part of that is the cost of energy. Experts say that once utility costs exceed 6 percent of household income, families struggle to meet other basic needs. In some eastern Kentucky counties, the average resident is paying more than 19 percent of their annual income on energy costs. In some counties, the average low-to medium-income household spent more than 40 percent of their income on energy costs.
“I’ve seen bills as high as $1,400 to $1,600 a month,” said Appalachia HEAT Squad project manager James Caudill. “It’s more of an epidemic than a problem.”
The average cost of energy in the state isn’t particularly high. Other factors, including the aging and substandard housing stock, contribute to the cost burden. Facing the combined effects of stagnating wages, growing utility bills, and rising housing costs, more residents in rural coal country are looking to energy efficiency and solar power for solutions.
Cost of Warmth
Benham, in eastern Kentucky, was a coal mining town, and until the 1960s electricity was provided by mining company International Harvester. When mining operations closed down, International Harvester sold the power grid to the town. Benham, home to fewer than 500 people as of the last census estimates, is one of only a handful of municipalities in Kentucky to own and operate its own power company.
“Everybody takes care of one another,” Power Board chairman Danny Quillen said. “It’s a close-knit community.” Quillen, 50, grew up in the neighboring town of Lynch.
In 2015, the Benham Power Board began receiving donations for an energy efficiency program called Benham$aves. The program conducted five energy efficiency audits before it shut down for lack of funds. It recently restarted when it received an anonymous donation of over $200,000. Quillen hopes the money will cover 20 more audits.
Quillen received one of the five original audits and it helped cut his power bill from $400 a month down to about $180 a month in winter.
“This is an old coal camp, and these are old houses,” Quillen said, referring to towns that were built and owned by coal companies to house workers. “You’ve got a lot of homeowners in the city that are on a fixed income and are unable to upgrade things that need to be upgraded.”
In Harlan County, where Quillen lives, the average low-to-medium income household spends 27 percent of their annual income on energy costs. The average per capita income in Harlan County is $13,351.
The impact of energy cost burden on already struggling families can be dramatic. A nation-wide study from the National Energy & Utility Affordability Coalition, an energy efficiency advocacy group, found that 17 percent of people who receive utility cost assistance from the federal Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP, had moved in with friends or relatives due to the high cost of utilities. Six percent of respondents had become homeless. Significant minorities of respondents said that because of high utility costs, they had skipped meals, heated their home using their oven, or failed to pay the full energy bill.
Katrina Metzler, the executive Director of NEUAC, said the need for energy assistance was much higher than the funds allocated for it. According to her organization, only 23 percent of Kentucky’s eligible population received energy cost assistance from LIHEAP.
“The average LIHEAP consumer is making well below $20,000 a year,” Metzler said. “After rent and groceries, there’s no money for anything else.”
A new homeless shelter in Letcher County has witnessed the impact of utility cost burden first-hand. Jimmy Scott, board member with Saving Grace Homeless Shelter, said he’s seen a number of residents seeking respite from the weather when they can’t afford their bills, or, in some cases, they are in houses that don’t have electricity at all.
“When it gets to the extremes, either in the middle of the summer too hot, or in the middle of winter when it gets close to zero, with no heat, then we see those people,” Scott said. “They have to come somewhere.”
Credit Sydney Boles
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Energy costs push some people to use Letcher Co.’s Saving Grace Homeless Shelter.
Housing Woes
When Seth Long isn’t producing maple syrup on his family farm, he runs the Letcher County housing nonprofit HOMES, Inc. Long sat down with Fahe’s James Caudill and explained that functionally, HOMES was the only housing developer in the county.
“There’s not many trained professional builders out there building these houses,” Long said. “Most of these houses around here, you find a carpenter, you pay them an hourly rate, you buy the materials, and you end up with a home. But what you end up with are just energy hogs.”
Mel Jones, Associate Director at the Virginia Center for Housing Research at Virginia Tech, saw that pattern region-wide. “In the aftermath of the recession, we saw construction companies consolidating and smaller construction companies failing,” she said. “That really hit rural places.” Construction of new housing has plummeted since the recession, driving up the cost of existing units.
Much of eastern Kentucky’s older housing stock was designed for coal heat, which required a draft to let out harmful smoke. “Those houses weren’t really retrofitted to handle ductwork,” Caudill said.
Long said many of the audits his organization and Fahe perform on older homes don’t get to energy efficiency upgrades because they exhaust the available funds on safety upgrades first. “The roof is bad, the HVAC is out, the floors are falling through. There’s things that really need to be done. And you go through all that before you can really address the energy efficiency stuff.”
According to energy auditors Oliver and Brown, the most challenging homes to audit and upgrade are manufactured homes. Mobile homes that were built before the 1976 implementation of energy efficiency regulations are especially costly to heat, Jones found. There are about 31,120 such homes in Appalachian Kentucky and 36,106 in West Virginia, accounting for roughly 20 and 28 percent of all manufactured housing in those states, respectively.
Utility Tensions
Rural Appalachian ratepayers have also been hit by the loss of industrial energy consumers. According to the Kentucky Public Service Commission, Kentucky Power, the utility that covers much of eastern Kentucky, has lost 26 percent of its industrial and commercial load since 2010, more than every other Kentucky utility except one.
“The utility’s got certain fixed costs that it’s going to have to pay,” said PSC spokesperson Andrew Melnykovych. “If you have fewer industrial and commercial ratepayers to share that burden, that shifts those fixed costs to residential consumers.”
Because of the cost of transmitting energy and maintaining the system, it is significantly more cost-effective to deliver a large amount of energy to one big industrial consumer than it is to send the same amount of energy to many lower-consumption residential consumers. In order to spur economic development and attract more high-consumption customers, Kentucky Power has sought to offer competitive reduced rates to certain industrial players.
“Few people want to go back to a time before electricity, so we want to make a system that works for all of us,” said Kentucky Power spokesperson Allison Barker., “That’s why we support economic development, it’s why we offer energy efficiency tips to our customers, and it’s why we want to help the communities that we serve through our acts of appreciation.”
The utility has offered reduced rates to companies including Braidy Industries, which plans to open a new aluminum plant in Ashland, and economic development grants to companies including truck parts manufacturer Silverliner in Pike County.
According to the PSC, energy efficiency, or demand-side management programs, are not primarily about saving customers money: They are meant to help power companies delay the need to invest in new power plants. In eastern Kentucky, the loss of major consumers has meant that wasn’t a risk.
The PSC in 2017 mandated that Kentucky Power eliminate all but one of its energy efficiency programs. Kentucky Power offers heating assistance programs through community action groups, and some customers make use of the utility’s Average Monthly Payment program, which reduces the spike in energy costs in winter months by charging customers for the average of their last 12 months’ usage.
Solar Solution
A recent analysis from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has shown that much of the Ohio Valley, including Appalachian Kentucky, will see an increasing energy burden as climate change progresses.
“It is very clear that energy expenditures in places like Tennessee, Kentucky, southern West Virginia and Ohio are going to increase 10 to 15 percent, according to the latest climate assessment,” said Union of Concerned Scientists energy analyst Joe Daniel.
“There’s increasing evidence that rooftop solar can reduce the energy burden,” Daniel said.
The housing nonprofit HOMES switched to solar power this month to save money as energy bills rise.
“We’re seeing the trend of this cycle and saying, we can’t be in business here 10 years from now if we just go along with this,” Long said. “Thinking about this made us think we need to invest dollars in solar so that in the future we’re not so impacted by these trends.”
Solar energy had already been gaining ground in coal communities, with the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum in Benham turning on its panels in 2017. Now a combination of factors has spurred a rush among groups in the region already looking to renewable energy to protect against future utility cost increases. In June, Letcher County’s Kings Creek Volunteer Fire Department and arts and media organization Appalshop, which is home to Ohio Valley ReSource partner station WMMT, added solar as well.
This is partly driven by a recent change in state policy. Even as HOMES and other nonprofits are looking to solar power as a solution, the state has made it harder for people to afford solar. Kentucky in 2019 passed legislation that reduced the potential return on investment for solar installations, likely slowing residential and commercial shifts to solar power. Like most utilities, Kentucky Power supported the legislation.
Solar systems in operation by the end of 2019 will be “grandfathered” into the law and would be allowed to retain all the financial benefits of switching to solar.
Credit Sydney Boles / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Gwen Johnson’s mother, Mabel, center, cuts the ribbon for the solar installation at Hemphill Community Center.
Gwen Johnson runs the Hemphill Community Center in Letcher County. She grew up in coal camp housing. “They were just built out of slats and plaster,” she recalled. “The windows were just single-pane and they weren’t caulked very well, so in the winter when the wind would blow, the curtains would fan in.”
Now, Johnson knows others in her community are in need of a warm place to go. In winter, she opens the center as a warming station. “We just had showers installed, so that when folks have power outages or they have no power, they can come here and warm,” she said.
Johnson said energy bills were often Hemphill’s biggest expense. The community center celebrated the completion of its new solar installation on June 21.
Things have changed in the old neighborhood. There are cool little restaurants and cafes, funky little shops and a vibrant art and music scene. On one side, you have the newcomers— people who came here to open new businesses and live in this trendy neighborhood. On the other side you have the old guard — the people who grew up here, before it was trendy, and have been watching the place they call home rapidly dissolve all around them. For this episode of the Us & Them, we look at the evolution of neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Chicago and New Orleans and learn how all of this change is anything but simple.
