New executive director brings fresh ideas to Raleigh Housing Authority

Sep. 30—The Raleigh County Housing Authority is turning over a new leaf.

The fresh start began with a new building, just down the street from the Beckley Welcome Center, and has continued with the hiring of Carmen Maniak as the new Raleigh County Housing Authority executive director.

Maniak said she's aware of Raleigh County Housing Authority's difficult past and is looking forward to making a new name for the organization.

"I wanted to help because there was a lot of good staff here working really hard without leadership for quite some time, so I saw it as an opportunity to be able to make a change," Maniak said.

For the last 10 years, Maniak has worked at the Charleston-Kanawha Housing Authority, where she started as HR coordinator and later became the director of the Housing Choice Voucher Program.

As the director of the Housing Choice Voucher Program, also referred to as Section 8 Housing, Maniak said she was able to get an in-depth look at the needs of the community.

"I love the program, and I think it's a really good program," she said. "You know people say, 'Well, they're abusing it or whatever.' But that's not what we're here for. We're here to house people that need housed ... We have a lot of people that are on the program, get the assistance, and then say 'Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I don't know what we would have done without you.' and those are your feel-good moments."

Maniak said one of her focuses as director will be engaging with the community members as well as local organizations in the eight counties the Raleigh County Housing Authority (RCHA) serves.

"We're working with people that need assistance," she said. "So us developing those relationships with the community partners will be able to help us be able to not only house people, but be able to refer them to other services."

The Raleigh Housing Authority serves Raleigh, Fayette, Braxton, Summers, Monroe, Greenbrier, Webster and Pocahontas counties with public housing, which is housing that is owned by the county and provided to low-income residents through HUD, and with Section 8 Housing, which is a program that allows low-income families to lease and rent properties with HUD assistance.

Raleigh Housing Authority also provides services to veterans for the eight counties and Mercer County, through a program called HUD VASH, which partners with the Veterans' Administration to provide housing to local veterans.

Since starting with the RCHA in June, Maniak said one of the first aspects of the job she started familiarizing herself with was the two public housing units RCHA owns — the Timberline Apartments in Mabscott and the Appletree apartments in Sophia.

She said this started with meetings with the managers as well as tenants.

As a result of these meetings, Maniak said they have conducted unit inspections and are looking to update and modernize some of the units.

She added that they're also looking to plan events for the tenants in these apartments.

"We said we're going to impact and make change and make it a positive because there are communities when you live in those sites, so we've also been holding people accountable in the developments," Maniak said. "Making sure they're safe and they're proud where they live. So we've been working towards that."

Maniak said she has also worked on revamping their Housing Choice Voucher Program, which for a while was not issuing any new vouchers.

"When we came in, we started cleaning stuff up. The utilization went down to 94 percent ... So now we're spending almost 100 percent of our funds. We've been issuing vouchers since I think May of last year," she said.

While new applicants are being put on the waitlist, Maniak said their oldest application is from June 2023.

"We went through and cleaned up the waiting list to get vouchers out there for people that needed them," she said.

Maniak said she credits the uptick in utilization of their services to their new location at 2955 Robert C. Byrd Drive in Beckley.

Just a stop light away from downtown Beckley, Maniak said their new location is more visible and in an area that is easily accessible to the community.

Since starting, she added that she's also been able to increase the number of Project-Based Vouchers (PVB) that are available in the communities they serve.

PVBs are rental vouchers that are tied to a specific number of unities in a specific building.

Outside of its programs, Maniak said they're planning to rebrand the RCHA to give it the fresh start it deserves.

"We really just have so much going on," she said. "It's almost like we're starting from scratch."

Email: jmoore@register-herald.com