NMHC eyes more housing unit inspections

The Northern Marianas Housing Corp. wants to do more inspections of homes where their housing subsidy beneficiaries live amid growing concerns that there might be a rapid turnover rate with several landlords and that some of the units are not fully occupied.

At present, the agency inspects these housing units once a year.

“We’re required to do an inspection once every year. That inspection is on the anniversary date, if you will. Of course, tenants move in all the time throughout the year-different months. The number of inspections we do varies widely by month,” corporate director Joshua Sasamoto said during Monday’s board meeting.

Board chair Marcie Tomokane recommended that NMHC do the inspection “every six months” to check if tenants on their records are the actual tenants at the housing units, and that a surprise visit is preferred.

Sasamoto explained, however, that the NMHC staff are limited by their 7:30am to 4:30pm work hours, not to mention the implementation of government-wide austerity measures.

Board member Diego Songao, for his part, said he would support an inspection “at least once every quarter to make sure that tenants are really following the policies we set forth between them and the landlord.”

Songao believes than a quarterly inspection would help them find out whether the landlord provides “the full amount of services that a tenant is supposed to be receiving” and if the tenants themselves abide by agency policies as well as landlord-tenant agreement.

Sasamoto noted that a quarterly inspection would mean an additional 120 inspections per month for their inspector which he said “would be very, very difficult, if not impossible.”

According to Tomokane, a landlord who has a high turnover rate of tenants could be a “red flag” landlord and should be weeded out of their list.

Sasamoto hinted that determining if the landlord is a “red flag” could be tricky since tenants have the option to move to another unit once they finish the first year of a lease.
“It is entirely up to the tenant about where they want to stay and when they want to move. .After the first year, they can move anywhere for no reason whatsoever,” he said.

Waiting list

Board member Pedro Itibus wants to find out if there is any way to determine if tenants are receiving “some kind of money” through better paying jobs to enable them to move out of the Housing Choice Voucher or Section 8 program and let others on the waiting list benefit from the program.

Program and Housing Division manager Zerlyn Taimanao told the board that there are 569 names on their Section 8 waiting list, ranked by date, time, and federal preferences through a system approved by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Tomokane and Sasamoto pointed out that tenants can stay up to 50 years “as long as they qualify and meet the guidelines.”

“Then all the 500 applicants that are still waiting will still be waiting and they would probably die before they go out [of the list],” said Songao.