Rent Assistance

Helping Hand House provides temporary low income housing, cash, rental assistance. Also homeless services provided. Helping Hand House is dedicated to ending and preventing family homelessness Pierce County. They help families with children find the skills they need to stay housed: budgeting, goal-setting, education and employment. Family homelessness is a problem of epidemic proportions, and the number of families who struggle to earn a wage sufficient to support their households grows daily. The lack of both affordable housing and employment paying a living wage has increased the number of households who are precariously housed or actively homeless. Research indicates that a household must work 81 hours a week at minimum wage, or 40 hours at $16.25/hour, to afford a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rate in Pierce County. A family needing three bedrooms must earn the equivalent of 3 full-time minimum wage jobs, $23.61/hour. Families continue to be the majority of the homeless population, locally and nationally. Requests for emergency shelter for families in Pierce County has increased every year since 1985, a trend they see every day at Helping Hand House, as the need far outweighs the resources available to address it. For every vacancy in emergency or transitional housing, at least four families will apply. For every household they can assist with prevention funds, ten are turned away.