Humboldt County’s Housing Subsidies Lose Funding as Homelessness Program Sunsets

Cheryl Churchill, executive director of the joint Humboldt County and Eureka Housing Authority agencies. [Screenshot]

With the advent of the Trump Administration, Humboldt County’s Section 8 housing support program has stopped and an emergency housing program’s imminent sunset could increase homelessness. Discussed at the March 24 Board of Supervisors meeting, a “shocking” political turnabout has upended the county’s ability to give people housing assistance.

Cheryl Churchill, executive director of the joint Humboldt County and Eureka Housing Authority agencies, said the county’s main voucher program – Housing Choice, better known as Section 8 – is now suspended indefinitely.

That’s because the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has “mandated that we cannot issue any new vouchers until they green-light us,” she continued.

Effected “as of the election in 2024,’ the voucher freeze resulted in the closure of the county’s Section 8 waiting list.

“We were having a high-growth year and that all stopped at the end of 2024,” said Churchill. “It also stopped for 2025 and again this year. So what the voucher program is seeing currently is a slow attrition until we are able to issue vouchers again.”

The county’s Emergency Housing Voucher Program, which “came during the pandemic as a response to the critical problem we were having with the COVID-19 spread and especially in our homeless population” is about to end as well.

The program was funded through 2030 – or least that was the intent, but “because of the significant increase in rents during the pandemic, the funding for the program actually is expiring much sooner than anticipated,” Churchill said.

Its funding will run out in early 2027, leaving voucher-holders without housing support.

“And HUD currently has no plan or no program to convert them,” she said. “HUD has suggested converting them to Housing Choice voucher assistance but when they’ve prevented us from being able to issue those vouchers, it means they’re essentially blocking our ability to convert these households.”

Churchill gave a heads-up on the impact.

“Without future support, it most likely means a return to homelessness for these people who have been able to gain stability over the last handful of years,” she said. “And it also means a significant impact to our landlords when we talk about a good-sized group of people potentially facing homelessness and eviction over the next year. I don’t have a solution … nobody has a solution.”

There are now 102 Emergency Housing Voucher Program recipients, the majority of them individuals. Churchill said when the program ends by early next year, the number will be down to 70 or 80 due to attrition.

Voucher programs related to tax credit-funded housing projects are continuing, including the Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing program and the Mainstream program for families with adult members who have disabilities.

Churchill said the county will refer some people to those programs in the absence of Section 8.

“I think that’s difficult for folks that live in the rural areas or the Southern Humboldt area,” said Supervisor Michelle Bushnell.

Churchill acknowledged that the voucher programs for tax-credit housing “are really centered in Eureka and Arcata.”

Board Chair Mike Wilson described housing as a need hat’s being snubbed by the Trump Administration.

“I think there is a sort of overt political context in the current situation which is that we had an election, it elected a federal administration that at all levels is hostile to the housing first approach and it’s hostile to housing people in general,” he said. “And H.R.1, the big crappy bill as I would call it, defunded what is functionally the best way to keep people from being unhoused and being homeless which is to subsidize housing.”

Wilson further described H.R. 1 as “a bill that sought to gave tax advantages to the wealthiest people in this country” and he also questioned “the amount we’re spending on a ridiculous war.”

He closed by saying, “It’s so frustrating because the simplest and easiest way for us to keep people off the street is to house them in existing housing and to have an administration that makes a conscious choice to defund that is shocking to me.”

There was some positive news in Churchill’s presentation. The Eureka Housing Authority owns and manages 270 housing units and more are being developed.

Churchill described projects that will result in new and rehabilitated units in Eureka, and development of the new Everding Community Center.