The Brown County Housing Authority will stop accepting new applicants for its largest rental assistance program, a first in years amid rents that outpaced funding, which has already kept many on the current waitlist for months longer than usual.
At 5 p.m. March 16, the waitlist will close for the tenant-specific, federal Housing Choice Voucher Program, which subsidizes rent for about 2,700 local low-income households a month. There are currently just shy of 2,000 people on that list. No existing voucher agreements or any other program waitlist will be affected, nor will applicants be taken off the waitlist.
The move is familiar to financially strapped housing authorities across the nation, as in Milwaukee and Waukesha, but rare for Brown County’s. The authority last closed its Housing Choice Voucher waitlist on Sept. 26, 2005, the Green Bay Press-Gazette reported at the time…