Massachusetts has a huge waitlist for state-funded housing. So why are 2,300 units vacant?

abcnews.go.com:

Massachusetts has about 184,000 people on a waitlist for the state’s public housing

Deb Libby is running out of time to find a place to live.

Libby, 56, moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, four years ago, in part to be closer to the doctors treating her for pancreatic cancer.

But the landlord wants her out by the end of the month and she can’t find anything else she can afford. She earns only a little more than minimum wage at a hardware store and often has to take unpaid time off because of health problems.

Libby thought she found a potential solution nearly a year ago: She applied for state public housing, a type of subsidized housing that’s almost unique to Massachusetts. But she’s heard nothing since.

“It’s frightening,” she said. “I seriously don’t know what to do. It’s like the system’s broken.”

In Massachusetts, which has some of the country’s most expensive real estate, Libby is among the 184,000 people on a waitlist for the state’s 41,500 subsidized apartments.

Yet a WBUR and ProPublica investigation found that nobody is living in nearly 2,300 state-funded apartments, with most sitting empty for months or years. The state pays local housing authorities to maintain and operate the units whether they’re occupied or not. So the vacant apartments translate into millions of Massachusetts taxpayer dollars wasted due to delays and disorder fostered by state and local mismanagement.

As of the end of July, almost 1,800 of the vacant units had been empty for more than 60 days. That’s the amount of time the state allows local housing authorities to take to fill a vacancy. About 730 of those have not been rented for at least a year.

Doris Romero, a housing coordinator at a Boston shelter, was stunned to hear about all the