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City of Tucson works to combat the affordable housing crisis with Landlord Incentive Program

By: Ciara Encinas

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TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — The City of Tucson is offering landlords incentives to be part of the solution to the affordable housing crisis in our community.

The city rolled out the Landlord Incentive Program to help Section 8 recipients find housing using CARES Act Funds.

“The goal is to provide quality housing for our clients to live in and to provide the landlords with the support to help our clients and keep them in their housing and not let them go into the street,” said Fernando Moraga, landlord support supervisor.

It's a solution in the midst of the affordable housing crisis the City of Tucson's Housing and Development department is seeing.

“There are so many people pouring in from other states. There are people who are running low because of COVID—people who have lost their jobs and can’t pay their rent, so now they’re on the street,” said Moraga.

The incentives include offering landlords money when signing a voucher recipient or renewing a recipient.

One of the 180 signed on is Rebecca Montague. She is the property manager at Palomino Crossings on Tucson's south side.

“It’s nice because it’s cash flow," she said.

She’s already signed on six voucher recipients resulting in hundreds of dollars.

“We’ll use it to do necessary upgrades like do necessary upgrades or maintain things that we need to do so instead of having to pull from different areas and figure out where we’re going to spend the money,” she explained.

Rental housing costs in Tucson

The city has $350,000 to give but has only given out less than half of the funds because they need more willing landlords to sign on.

“There are a lot of people that are needing a home that is on a voucher program but have no place to go and after a period of time if they don’t find a place they could be homeless and we’re trying to prevent that from happening. So, we need to be able to have places to place these individuals,” said Moraga.

You can find more information, here.

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