Town of Carrboro to Provide Increased Aid, Help Residents Pay Rent

Carrboro Town Council moved to raise the maximum grant award for rental assistance from its current $1,000 dollars to $2,000 dollars Tuesday night.

As many local businesses remain closed and residents are advised to stay home from work, financial strain in the community continues to grow.

As of last week, around 22 million people, or roughly 13.5 percent of the nation’s labor force, have applied for unemployment since March 14.

With so many people without stable income, local government is having to step up their efforts to provide emergency financial aid for those in need.

One of the biggest financial burdens for many families is paying rent.

In light of this, Carrboro Mayor Lydia Lavelle said the town wanted to increase the available funding to help residents pay their rent.

“We’re looking at every way we can to help our residents and help our businesses,” Lavelle said.

Back in 2007, the Carrboro Town Council created their Affordable Housing Special Revenue Fund.

This affordable housing fund was created to help the council increase and maintain the levels of affordable housing within the town.

This month, with the coronavirus pandemic and its financial implications in mind, the Affordable Housing Commission considered changes to the fund by increasing the amount of allocated rental and utility deposit assistance.

The biggest change discussed at Tuesday’s town council meeting was raising the maximum available grant for rental and utility assistance from $1,000 to $2,000 dollars. The council successfully moved to adopt this change.

In the 2018 to 2019 fiscal year, only two percent of spending from the affordable housing fund went towards rental and deposit assistance.

But with unprecedented factors such as the coronavirus pandemic in play, Lavelle said this increase in financial assistance is designed to better reflect the true costs of current market rents, deposit fees and housing stabilization.

Before moving to adopt this increased aid resolution, Carrboro offered the least amount of aid in comparison to the rest of the county’s rental assistance programs. The town offered a maximum one-time grant of $1,000 dollars whereas Hillsborough offers rental assistance up to $2,000 dollars once every 18 months if needed.

Lavelle said she is hoping this initial change to their rental assistance program will be the first step to regionally aligning their program with other local jurisdictions’.

“I know that’s an effort we are doing internally but we are also partnering with our local jurisdictions to try to come up with some kind of consistency around how we are all going to be addressing a rental payment crisis that might start happening when we come out of this and when folks are still trying to stay in their homes and aren’t able to pay their rent,” Lavelle said.

Orange County, Chapel Hill, Hillsborough, and Carrboro Housing Departments are currently discussing how to align their programs so the application process is streamlined and simplified.

“We want to be able to provide some opportunity for people that are really in dire need,” Lavelle said.

To read more about the changes to Carrboro’s Affordable Housing Special Revenue Fund, and to see what else was discussed at Tuesday’s town council meeting, visit their website.

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Town of Carrboro to Provide Increased Aid, Help Residents Pay Rent

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