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Chapter 6: Housing and Shelter Affordable housing is in short supply throughout the county, as demonstrated in Chapter 3. However, very high cost housing markets reduce the supply of affordable housing further and make rental assistance programs a more limited alternative. Increases in housing costs often - occur when the economy is stronger. Rents went down somewhat in the early `90s with the recession and had made Section 8 and other assistance programs more desirable to many landlords. These trends have started to reverse and rents are going up while vacancy rates are - decreasing again. South County, in close proximity to the Silicon Valley, faces an extremely high rental market, and some landlords that had previously accepted Section 8 are no longer willing to do so because of the limitations placed on the rents they can charge under that program. The need for long-term, subsidized rents becomes even more critical in light of recent cuts in existing income support programs and the looming crisis posed by the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law. Given the restructuring of entitlement programs as we have understood __ them and, in some cases, the denial of such benefits to persons who have historically been eligible to receive such income support, a larger segment of the low income population will become homeless for the first time. The development of affordable housing is a long-term process and fraught with difficulty on a number of levels. Aside from difficulty in finding suitable land and overcoming neighborhood _ barriers which often arise in the siting of these developments, a major obstacle has been the lack of financing available to create projects serving very low and extremely low income households. In recent years, the federal and state programs previously available to finance the - development of affordable housing have become more difficult to access (e.g. Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program) or have run out of money (e.g. State of California Rental Housing Construction program and/or Housing Rehabilitation Program, etc.) With the - prospect of new State housing programs looking highly unlikely, the need for an additional source of development financing becomes even more important. The Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program has recently been the primary resource for funding new affordable housing development in California. Recent changes to the Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP) have shifted the emphasis away from urban/suburban areas characteristic of most of Alameda County. As a result of changes in the QAP, the majority of tax credits in the last two funding cycles have gone to projects in rural areas _ (where development costs are relatively low) and in the Los Angeles area (where emergency earthquake relief funding has boosted the local share funds). A coordinated, multi jurisdictional advocacy effort is needed in order to change the QAP so that projects in _ Alameda County have a fair chance of obtaining future tax credits to develop or rehabilitate affordable housing. Alameda County-Wide Homeless Continuum of Care Plan: April 1997 84