As part of another $5 billion dispatch of emergency housing assistance funds, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has granted nearly 1,400 housing vouchers to public agencies across Georgia. 

These vouchers, announced on Monday and financed by Congress’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, represent a federal effort to reduce and prevent homelessness in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Of the 1,349 vouchers promised by this latest round of housing assistance funding, 798 are bound for the Georgia Department of Community Affairs (DCA), 28 are headed to Fulton County’s housing authority and 143 are allocated to Atlanta Housing (AH), the city’s public housing agency. 

As with the county’s federally supported emergency housing assistance program, Fulton’s new batch of vouchers will be reserved for non-Atlantans, since the city runs its own operation to help its residents — which make up about half of the county’s nearly 1.1 million-person population. The same goes for the DCA vouchers.

AH CEO Eugene Jones told Atlanta Civic Circle that the announcement is “great news” and “we are proud to administer additional vouchers and to collaborate with our partners in Atlanta to house the most vulnerable.” 

HUD’s voucher allocation, part of its Emergency Housing Voucher (EHV) program, “is providing 70,000 housing choice vouchers to local public housing authorities across the country to help Americans remain in housing,” according to an agency press release. 

“While most of us spent more time in our homes than we ever have, more than half a million Americans had to spend the last year either in crowded shelters or sleeping outside,” HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge said during a Monday press conference. “With HUD’s swift allocation of this $5 billion in American Rescue Plan funding, we are providing communities the resources to give homes to the people who have had to endure the COVID-19 pandemic without one.”

Monday’s news comes on the heels of another HUD announcement from last week that Georgia received $1.4 million in vouchers to help keep residents at home. 

People who need the vouchers should reach out to their local housing authority or, if they don’t have one, contact DCA officials about applying for assistance. 

(Header image, via Samuel Schroth, Unsplash: The U.S. Capitol Building.)