A nightmare

[gwendally]

One of the things that I do that is fairly weird is I put cash away for specific purposes. It's the old-fashioned "envelope method", and it works for me. So it isn't abnormal for me to have a $50 or $100 bill that is designated for "entertainment" or "vacation" or whatever. This is by way of explanation for how something played out in a dream I

Comments

Section 8

[gwendally]

So I decided to pursue the Section 8 housing route. I'm good at paperwork, how hard could this be?

Really hard. I don't want to go into all the bullshit they've put me through - phone call after phone call, fax and email and broken appointments and on and on - but so far I haven't even gotten the place INSPECTED and they won't tell me what they inspect for so I suspect we'll fail, because poor people have to have better housing that private pay people, right?

Meanwhile, the person approved for this two bedroom two bathroom house in terms of price is a single woman. What? Section 8 covers two bedroom apartments for single people? Fuck this.

Re: Section 8

[coercedbynutmeg]

There was a woman in our old town who was on Section 8 and got a 3/2, which was nicer than what Jason and I were shelling out $1000/mo for. And she was a late-40s empty-nester. And had the brilliant idea to sublet out the other bedrooms for pocket money. Horseshit.

Re: Section 8

[gwendally]

Nearly every adult who has looked at my apartment is on disability. It's really pretty astonishing. They all appear to be working under the table, too, because when I ask about ability to pay they cite their SSDI checks and their child support and their income from their online ebay business... and one told me she had a pretty good chunk of change from a lawsuit, too, that she could dive into if cash came up short. Well, then, no problem there! (! Do tenants not know that "I sue people for a living" is a bad attribute in someone?)

Re: Section 8

[ford_prefect42]

Oddly enough, they really don't seem to. I have had several perspective tenants regale me with stories of their litigious activities, abuses of previous landlords, and tales of felony prison time. It's part of why my connotation of "a sense of entitlement" is *quite* as negative as it is.

[ssterikoff]

My sympathies. How do things currently work with Section 8? Do they pay you directly, or does the tenant get the money and pay you?

My dad thought that was the best way to find a tenant many years ago and was screwed. It was difficult to get her out, and the response was that it wasn't the governments problem that she wasn't using the money for the purpose she was given it.

FWIW, we've had one really good tenant in our house in the UK and two lousy ones. Finding a good tenant seems to be a crap shoot even when you do your best to weed out the bad ones.

[gwendally]

Theoretically the tenant is subsidized, i.e., they pay something like $100/month and the housing department pays the other $750. In practice I think you end up taking $750 because there isn't any way to evict the person for not paying $100, and they all decide that they're poor and you're rich so you'd be an asshole to insist that poor disabled them pay you $100

[ford_prefect42]

When the only method of "rationing" is "rationing by suck", you can bet that an agency can produce an awful lot of suck. Most social services programs, particularly in blue states have no official rationing methodologies, and entirely too few structural barriers. So they implement budget control by making it as miserable as humanly possible to work with the systems.

Which is *particularly* unfortunate, because it means that the people that need the help the most get the least, while creating massive deficits, social ills, and misery.

Functionally, the democrat model of safety net is to create a system that can only be defrauded.

[crazyburro]

for what it's worth... I remember hearing from my father, who managed some rentals on the side for relatives at one point, that section 8 (or the state level equivalent of the era) was usually not worth having. The level of "oversight" was higher and although most of the tenants were perfectly fine (and had a largely guaranteed payment) the ones that weren't really sucked/had higher costs/negated the ones that were perfectly good.

These were not class A apartments. But they were perfectly fine such as they were. Just unrenovated since the 1930s.

Always used to wonder why people needing rental aid frequently had money to support cats/dogs...

[abz6598]

You paid for this property with money you earned through your own sweat, tears, time away from your kids, fights with your husband, and youre going let some welfare case who has absolutely no skin in the game live in it?

Seriously?

If you rent to the Section 8 crowd this will go down as one of your Greater Mistakes. Don't do it.

'Guaranteed payment' from government won't make up for the utter shittiness that is going to result from the vast spectrum of useless eaters that are going to want to occupy your property.

While Im sure there are some Section 8 cases who aren't tragic losers doomed to lives of mediocrity and self-righteous whining about 'social justice', my experience has been that the vast majority are people who you would find on a Greyhound bus eating nacho cheese dip out of a jar and reading the National Enquirer while heading to Atlantic City to gamble with the money they draw off their EBT cards.

[gwendally]

Here's the kicker; the only people who want to live in the dump upstairs are Section 8 people. 100% of the people who think it is a reasonable place to live are on disability. The downtown location close to the bus station is great for people who don't have a car (or had their license seized