Johnson County housing voucher surge highlights strain of affordable housing

KSHB 41 reporter Olivia Acree covers portions of Johnson County, Kansas. Share your story idea with Olivia .

We now know just how important the Johnson County Housing Choice Voucher Program is to people that live here. Remember last month, we shared with you that Johnson County opened their housing voucher waitlist.

After I shared that the voucher waitlist had opened , there was a ton of interest in this story.

I followed up to explain how in demand these vouchers are, how hard they are to get your hands on, and how hard they are to use.

The Johnson County Housing Choice Voucher Program waitlist opened in July. Since then, more than 2,100 people signed up for the list. It filled up within 16 minutes. Yet only 600 people will move onto the next steps of getting a housing voucher.

A number Johnson County Housing Service director, Heather McNeive, wants to change.

Olivia Acree/KSHB

“Johnson County is able to offer more rental assistance in the community than we have units available for those families to use their subsidy. So, the shortage of affordable housing is dramatically impacting Johnson County, and it's something that we're actively trying to work on,” said McNeive.

To give some context on the likelihood of success with these vouchers, I pulled some numbers from last year.

In 2023, Johnson County accepted 1,000 applicants. They helped around 110 of them get a voucher but only around 60 were able to find housing. That’s 5%.

The county wants to keep offering landlord incentives using money from its own budget even though the federal funding ends this year.

“We really want to make sure that we're able to offer as much rental assistance as we can to the community,” said McNeive.

Johnson County says getting through the applicants will be a lengthy process. The 600 that were accepted were notified last week by mail, email, and phone about the next steps to getting a housing voucher.