OAKLAND — Peruse the rental housing listings on Craigslist and you’ll find ads that say “No Section 8.” There are landlords who accept cats and dogs but want no part of humans on the federal housing subsidy program for disabled, elderly and poor people.

“When you do finally find a place that will take it, there’s 25 or 30 other people on Section 8 who show up,” said Desma Golden. The 49-year-old Oakland resident, who is disabled, has been trying to use her voucher to rent a two-bedroom apartment since August 2014.

Golden has been swept up by market forces beyond her control. There is a critical housing shortage for people of all income levels, and rents are soaring. In this super hot market, low-income people trying to use Section 8 are finding it almost impossible to find landlords willing to rent to them.

And it’s not just a Bay Area problem. The same thing is happening in other high-rent cities like Washington, D.C., New York, and Seattle. “I’ve been in various meetings with HUD (U.S. Housing and Urban Development) officials and explained to them I see a program that’s dying,” said Eric Johnson, executive director of the Oakland Housing Authority.

According to Oakland housing officials, the city has lost 1,200 of its 7,000 Section 8 landlords since 2014. Though new landlords have signed up, it hasn’t made up for the loss of affordable rentals.

Johnson said the Oakland Housing Authority is hoping to increase the number of available low-income units by issuing “project-based” vouchers that are tied to a particular unit, rather than a person. The idea is that new landlord incentives will help lock down more Section 8 units over the long-term.

As things stand now, landlord and property managers say they have very good reasons for shunning Section 8 that have nothing to do with greed. Some don’t want to deal with mandatory property inspections, government regulations and an oftentimes unhelpful housing authority bureaucracy. Landlords have complained about tenants who refused to pay rent and damaged property. They say that once a Section 8 renter moves in, it’s very hard to get them out regardless of how problematic the person is.

It was a different story when vacancy rates were higher. Landlords had more of a financial incentive to rent to what they considered higher-risk tenants for a guaranteed monthly check from the federal government.

But nowadays, a two-hour open house can yield 20 applications. Another big reason why many landlords won’t accept Section 8 is that the government subsidy has in many instances been much lower than the rent they could get from someone not on the voucher program. Oakland landlord Carmen Madden has rented to Section 8 tenants in the past and has one currently. But she has stopped accepting the vouchers.

“What bothers me most is you can’t get the money for the unit and you can’t evict in a timely manner,” she said.

Under the Housing Choice Voucher Program, better known as Section 8, HUD gives money to local housing authorities, which then distribute vouchers to low-income recipients. Section 8 tenants pay 30 percent of their income in rent, and the federal government pays the remainder to the landlord, based on what federal housing officials determine is fair-market rent.

Earlier this year, HUD increased its benchmark for rents in Alameda and Contra Costa counties by 35 percent, but the program is still grossly underfunded.

Many Section 8 waiting lists are years long. A renter with a voucher only has a few months to find a place. If he doesn’t make the deadline, he loses his voucher and has to reapply. Homeless people with Section 8 vouchers are flooding the Berkeley Drop-in Center seeking aid. Some are living in their cars, in shelters and tents, according to Executive Director Katrina Killian. ﻿

“There are too few vouchers and the ones out there, no one will take,” she said.

Tenant advocates blame greedy landlords for the fact that so many vulnerable people are being left out in the cold

“They’re charging as much as they can get regardless of the negative impacts,” said Leah Simon Weisberg, legal director for Tenants Together, an affordable housing advocacy group.

But Judy Shaw, owner of Shaw Properties, a property management company in Berkeley, says she’s tired of being unfairly characterized as the bad guy when in reality landlords are leery of getting involved with the program in part because of regulations that favor tenants’ rights over landlords’ rights.

“People are nervous that once you get involved in a certain way, you are going to be in it forever,” she said.

A bill introduced by state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, would have prohibited property owners from refusing to accept an application from someone solely because he is on Section 8. It died last month in the Senate Appropriations Committee under intense opposition from property owners and managers groups, including the California Apartment Association.

“Many of the housing authorities don’t have the resources and funding to pay market rents,” said spokeswoman Debra Carlton, whose group argued that participation in the program should remain voluntary.

Affordable housing advocates who supported the bill say it would have prevented low-income renters with perfectly good rental histories from being denied without even getting a chance to have their application reviewed.

“What’s happening here is, where it used to take someone with Section 8 a couple of months to find housing, now it might take eight or nine months,” said Joseph Villarreal, executive director of the Contra Costa Housing Authority. The housing that is available tends to be in undesirable, high-crime areas.

Brittany Shoras ﻿made over 500 phone calls before she finally found one apartment in Antioch that would accept her application, and she still has to wait and see whether it passes the HUD inspection. It’s in a rough section of town where she says she doesn’t feel safe as a transgender woman.

For 10 years, Shoras, 57, rented a one-bedroom apartment in Walnut Creek, but in July 2015 her landlord raised the rent from $1,100 to $1,700 and dropped out of the Section 8 program. So Shoras, who gets less than $1,000 a month in Social Security and disability, had to move further east to find a place to live.

Recently, her one-year lease in Antioch wasn’t renewed, so she’s once again searching for another scarce place that will accept her voucher. At this point, she’s thinking about giving up altogether and moving to Utah.

“It’s sad,” she said. “I want to live in my state, and I can’t.”

There are still many landlords in the East Bay who do accept Section 8 tenants. Last month, Eric Green rented a three-bedroom apartment to a desperate mother of four. This after he got a pleading call from Christina Murphy, a housing counselor at the Berkeley Drop-in Center.

“After seeing so many people who have been put out of their homes in the last two years,” Green said, “my heart just opened up.”

Golden is still waiting for her break. She said she lost the two-bedroom cottage she’d been renting in North Oakland for 10 years when her landlord stopped accepting Section 8. She moved in with her mother.

“If I didn’t have my mama,” Golden said, “I’d be living in my car or outside in a tent.”

Contact Tammerlin Drummond at 510-208-6468. Follow her at Twitter.com/Tammerlin.