A Note About Rental Assistance

VISTA members can recieve rent assistance in a couple of different ways.

• While VISTA members cannot recieve additional money from their site, they can recieve further assistance like reimbusement for travel expenses and housing assistance. A site cannot give you money for housing, but they can provide free housing or write a landlord a check. Perhaps your director can put you up for a couple weeks in his basement while you are room searching. Maybe there are some extra funds to help with big city rent. Needless to say, all this depends on the resources available to your site.

• One of the rarely discussed perks of service is that VISTAs qualify for housing through section 8 (or H.U.D.) and can actually pay a rent of $0 a month, in some cases. It really depends on what is available in an area, as well as the area's demand for low-income housing. The bigger the city/town, the more likely a lengthy waiting list. As with other federal assistance, your locality will require different amounts of bureaucracy to wade through.

Tip: Housing Maps is a website that overlays craigslist housing listings on a map so you can immediately see how close an apartment is to your work/certain neighborhoods/etc. Great tool when searching for a place to live.