Nancy Powell and her daughter rent a house in Wendell with help from a housing assistance voucher. Each month, Powell pays her share of the rent directly to her landlord, and the Wake County Housing Authority (WCHA) is supposed to pay the other part.
The agency began making late payments last November, according to emails between Powell and her landlord that INDY viewed. The delays grew longer each month: the WCHA’s share of December’s rent didn’t arrive until January 9, and then January’s rent didn’t come until February 21. By April 7, when the landlord still hadn’t received March’s or April’s payments from the WCHA, he informed Powell—who was up to date on her own payments—that he might have to terminate her lease.
“I’ve been attempting to communicate with Wake Housing for some time now regarding issues with their payments for you, and they have been continually dodging me and ignoring me,” the landlord wrote to Powell.
“You’re a good tenant, and we don’t want you to have to move out, but if we can’t get any resolution on this, we are going to have to terminate the lease and ask you to vacate the property by the end of the month,” he continued.
Powell says she called and visited the WCHA repeatedly but they either ignored her or claimed not to know the answers to her questions. She says one former staff member at the agency even hung up on her landlord midconversation. In May, Powell says her landlord asked her to leave the apartment by the end of June.
“He doesn’t trust [the WCHA] anymore because of how inappropriately they handled the situation,” Powell says.
“It’s been hard for my daughter,” she adds. “She was crying, like, ‘I’m tired of moving every year.’ And it’s very stressful and expensive. If you’re on a housing voucher, you can’t exactly afford to move.”
Landlords owed rent
Powell and her landlord are not the only ones who’ve had trouble getting rental payments and answers from the WCHA, the federally funded agency in charge of managing Wake County’s public housing and distributing housing assistance vouchers. In his May report to the WCHA’s board, interim director Michael Best wrote that the WCHA owes about $1.9 million in unpaid rent to landlords around the county.
Meeting minutes from the WCHA’s May board meeting detail Best’s report and list a series of guests who took turns raising concerns about the agency’s operations.
The first speaker, a representative from the regional property management firm Fitch Irick Corporation, complained that the WCHA owed them rent money.
The second speaker, a private landlord, was experiencing the same problem.
The third, Wake County commissioner Safiyah Jackson, “expressed her concern regarding the crisis at the housing authority,” according to the minutes, and asked how she and the county could help course-correct.
INDY asked Best about the overdue payments and “crisis.” He explained that after he was hired in April, he learned that the Housing Authority had recently experienced a large amount of staff turnover, which led to emails from landlords and tenants going unanswered and complaints going unresolved.
Best says he learned that the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which oversees the housing voucher program for low-income renters, had assessed the WCHA’s operations, determined the agency was “troubled,” in HUD parlance, and prescribed a “recovery plan.”
“It’s a very complex situation,” Best says. “Bottom line, we have to take each individual case and try to work through it in order to get some resolution.”
According to Best, the WCHA inherited most of its current problems. In addition to managing some 300 units of public housing and distributing about 540 housing vouchers each year, the agency is responsible for low-income renters who move to Wake County from other jurisdictions and bring their housing assistance vouchers with them, or live in Wake County but have a voucher from a statewide housing authority. (This is the case for Powell—her voucher comes from the North Carolina Commission of Indian Affairs.) The “initial” housing authority is supposed to pay the WCHA for those voucher recipients’ housing assistance, which the WCHA is supposed to pass along to their new landlords. But Best said the WCHA is owed $1.9 million by 114 different public housing authorities around the country.
How did the WCHA allow that balance to climb so high?
According to Best, before he arrived, the agency failed to submit updated HUD paperwork for 260 voucher households who moved to Wake County from other jurisdictions. Without that paperwork, the “initial” housing authorities didn’t know whether or how much money to send to the WCHA.
Best says the WCHA has cleared the paperwork backlog for all but 54 of those 260 households and is working to finish the rest. He adds that even without updated paperwork, HUD instructs initial housing authorities to continue paying tenants’ rent.
Best and his staff are currently in the process of contacting each of the 114 public housing authorities individually to ask them to pay. He describes a laborious process of back-and-forth messages, conference calls, and exchanges of paperwork to settle each balance. He adds that a handful of housing authorities, including Durham’s and New York City’s, owe the majority of the $1.9 million.
“It’s going to take a little time,” Best says. “But bottom line, we’re on top of it.”
In response to a request for comment, the Durham Housing Authority declined to say how much they owe the WCHA but indicated that payments are owed both ways.
“We have been in contact with the Wake County Housing Authority, as recent [sic] as last week regarding the outstanding payments as well as the payments that they owe us,” a spokesperson wrote in an email to INDY.
“We have the adequate staffing”
Even if the out-of-town housing authorities are to blame for some of the unpaid rent, it’s not entirely clear why it’s taken the WCHA so long to start trying to collect the money. One reason seems to be the high turnover at the agency: Best says most of his staff have only been at the WCHA a few months longer than he has and that there was “a big turnover” after the pandemic.
In response to INDY’s inquiry about reasons for the turnover he says, “I don’t even know, because nobody’s really here to even ask that question.”
The WCHA has hired four new staff members since Best arrived, he says. They now only have one “crucial vacancy” to fill and are actively interviewing candidates for that role. The WCHA website lists 14 current employees.
“We have the adequate staffing to aggressively address the issues at hand,” Best says.
As for the total number of unpaid rent cases the WCHA is handling right now, he couldn’t say for certain.
“I’m working 15 or 20 directly,” Best says. “These are ones that landlords have sent over emails, and we’re researching to find out the status of their payments … but I realize there’s more.”
Best also declined to provide a timeline for when all of the past-due rent will be paid because of the interagency coordination involved.
HUD and Wake County have both taken notice of the WCHA’s challenges.
HUD’s “recovery plan” includes a series of internal evaluations and reforms, Best says.
Although the WCHA is an independent agency, the Wake County Board of Commissioners appoints its board. A Wake County spokesperson told INDY, “We are aware of the concerns that renters and landlords have voiced regarding timely payment, and we’re willing to support the Housing Authority as they work to address these challenges.”
Correction: Nancy Powell lives in a house in Wendell, not an apartment. She says a housing authority staffer hung up on her landlord during a call, not on her.
Chloe Courtney Bohl is a Report for America corps member. Follow her on Bluesky or reach her at [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].