City Council passes resolution to address backlog of housing vouchers

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - No matter where you go in the city of Atlanta, you’ll see apartments popping up everywhere.

But affordable housing is still hard to come by these days. Councilmember Liliana Bakhtiari told Atlanta News First why.

“One of the issues that we have is that for-profit developers are coming in and buying a lot of the housing that previously would accept vouchers and then discontinuing the program and evicting the people that were dependent on them,” Bakhtiari said.

On Monday, Atlanta City Council approved a resolution that urges residential developers who receive financial incentives from the city to accept tenants who pay rent using federal housing vouchers.

Now, city leaders are hopeful that this will open more housing to low-income residents at a time when the city faces an affordable housing crisis.

“We have a 20,000 plus backlog of individual families with housing vouchers waiting for housing so what this will do is provide more opportunity for them to actually receive housing in Atlanta,” Bakhtiari said.

Bakhtiari believes the city should be opening doors to responsible renters, not shutting them out at a time when there is rising inflation, soaring rents and a lack of housing options.

“Workforce housing in my district for say a parent and their child for just those two is about $1,700 right now. That’s not affordable for a lot of people. So, what a housing voucher is going to do is ensure that that person doesn’t pay more than 30% of their income towards their rent,” Bakhtiari said.

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