Recently Improved Apartment In 3-Unit Building Fails Section 8 Inspection, Leaving Voucher-Holding Paterson Family Temporarily Homeless; Inconsistency Between Reviews By Different Housing Administrators May Be To Blame As Landlord Claims Remaining Two Units Have Already Passed Muster w/ Another Agency

In Paterson, New Jersey, NorthJersey.com reports:

• The three-family house at 476 Ellison St. sits next to a vacant building that has plywood boards covering the front door and first-floor windows.
  
  Directly across the street stands a charred, burned-out structure, which is alongside another empty dwelling. Quality-of-life crimes – including drug dealing and prostitution – are commonplace in the neighborhood.
  
  It might not seem like most people’s dream home, but one Paterson family – a woman in her 40s with a 15-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter – was hoping to move into the second-floor apartment at 476 Ellison this week. The mother said the lease on their previous home expired Dec. 30.
  
  Their moving plans, however, were sidetracked when the state last week rejected the woman’s application to use a $1,350-per-month Section 8 housing voucher at the Ellison Street location – a decision officials said was based on their findings that the place failed to meet quality standards. In particular, state officials cited the nearby vacant buildings.
  
  “One is full of trash, debris, etc., the other is boarded up,” wrote New Jersey Department of Community Affairs spokesman Emike Omogbai.
  
  As a result, the woman and her children were putting their belongings in storage on Wednesday afternoon and getting ready to look for a hotel room. “I’ve got nowhere else to go,” said the woman, who asked that her name not be published so her comments would not jeopardize her eligibility for the housing assistance.
  
  The situation has outraged the owner of the building on Ellison Street.
  
  “If everyone wasn't allowed to move next to a house that had a fire or an abandoned property, the city of Patterson would be deserted it and there would be no economic growth,” said Nick Daurio of JCM Investors.
  
  Daurio said his company was “bringing life back to the city of Patterson” by renovating vacant buildings. He asserted that the state officials overseeing the housing voucher program “should be supporting the people who take initiative to rebuild the city.”
  
  The building has two other tenants on the first and third floors. Daurio said both of them pay their rent with Section 8 vouchers provided by the Paterson Housing Authority, which he said approved the site as meeting federal quality standards. The executive director of the Paterson housing agency did not respond to a phone message seeking confirmation of those assertions.
  
  Section 8 vouchers are handled by a variety of agencies and organizations around New Jersey and each of them is responsible for approving the apartments for their own clients. The woman who was looking to move into 476 Ellison happens to be part of the DCA’s program and not the one run by the city housing authority.
  
  “It’s a nice apartment,” the woman said, walking through the living room of the place on Ellison Avenue. Daurio said JCM had acquired what had been a vacant house about six months ago and renovated the building. It now has new windows, a paint job and low-cost carpeting.
  
  When asked about the vacant structures nearby, the would-be tenant said: “That’s not bothering me. That’s over there. I want to live here.”
  
  DCA officials said they were willing to continue providing the woman with a Section 8 voucher for the apartment where she had been living, on East 24th Street. The state said the woman was under no obligation to leave her old apartment and could not have been kicked out because of protections provided by New Jersey’s anti-eviction laws.
  
  But the woman said that if she tried to stay at the East 24th Street apartment beyond the end of her lease, her landlord would not return the deposit she had put down when she initially moved there. She said she could not afford to risk losing that money. “I’m not working right now,” she said.
  
  Daurio said that when he went to complain at the state housing office at 100 Hamilton Plaza in Paterson, a supervisor told him the agency wanted to get Section 8 clients away from Paterson to suburban areas.
  
  State officials said Daurio’s assertion is not true. “When the landlord went to the office, he was not told that people were being ‘steered away’ from Paterson,” Omogbai wrote. “He was told that the unit failed the inspection due to the site and neighborhood criteria listed above.”
  
  For JCM Investors, the issue over the Ellison Street apartment has bigger implications. The firm’s principal, Charles Florio, owns more than 100 buildings in Paterson’s most troubled neighborhoods. Many of his tenants pay their rent with Section 8 vouchers.

Source: Paterson family in limbo after state rejects housing voucher for apartment in troubled area.