The morning I met Clint Ramos, he was sweeping up hair clippings from the floor of his two-chair shop on Birmingham’s Southside, the kind of careful, unhurried motion that tells you a person is trying to keep their mind from going somewhere they don’t want it to go. He had messaged our publication three weeks earlier, after reading a story I wrote about a Memphis couple who had navigated Alabama’s emergency rental assistance program. “That was basically my situation,” he wrote, “except I didn’t find out about any of it in time.”
I drove down to meet him on a Tuesday afternoon in late March 2026. He was 25, engaged to his partner Deja, who is finishing a nursing degree at UAB. They have no children. He opened his shop, Ramos Cuts, in early 2023 with a $12,000 loan from his uncle and a lot of confidence. By late 2025, that confidence had developed a few cracks.
The Lease Renewal That Changed Everything
The letter came in October 2025. Clint’s landlord was renewing his lease on the two-bedroom apartment he and Deja shared in the Avondale neighborhood — and the new monthly rent would be $1,365, up from $1,050. That is a $315-a-month increase, or roughly 30%, with 45 days’ notice to decide.
“I just sat there and read it twice,” Clint told me, leaning back in one of his barber chairs. “Like maybe I was misreading it. But no, it was right there in black and white.”
Alabama has no statewide rent control law, which means increases like Clint’s are legal as long as proper notice is given. Forty-five days is technically above the state’s minimum 30-day requirement for a lease renewal notice. He had no legal recourse. The only question was whether he could absorb the cost.
The math was brutal. By the fourth quarter of 2025, Ramos Cuts was bringing in roughly $2,800 a month after paying his chair rental and supply costs — down from a high of about $3,600 in the summer of 2024, when a wave of new apartments went up nearby and foot traffic picked up. That decline, Clint said, tracked almost directly with a competing chain salon that opened three blocks away in September 2024.
What Housing Assistance Programs Actually Exist — and Who They’re Built For
When the rent letter arrived, Clint did what a lot of people his age do: he started Googling. He found references to Section 8, emergency rental assistance, and something called the Housing Choice Voucher program. What he also found was a tangle of eligibility rules, closed waitlists, and programs that had technically expired.
According to HUD’s Housing Choice Voucher program page, the program is designed to help very low-income families, elderly individuals, and people with disabilities afford private-market housing. Self-employed applicants — like a barber who owns his own shop — must document income through tax returns and bank statements, which adds a layer of complexity that can delay or complicate applications.
Clint’s combined household income from his shop and Deja’s part-time work as a medical assistant put them at roughly $42,000 annually — just above the threshold that would have qualified them for some of the more robust housing subsidy options. “I kept reading these forms and thinking, okay, we make too much for this one, but not enough for the rent they’re asking,” he said. “It felt like falling through the cracks.”
The Emergency Rental Assistance Programs He Missed
What Clint didn’t know — and what he told me he wished someone had mentioned earlier — was that Jefferson County had administered a local Emergency Rental Assistance program funded through federal COVID-era relief dollars. That program had helped thousands of households in 2021 and 2022, but by the time Clint needed help in late 2025, the funding had been exhausted and the program was no longer accepting applications.
He also didn’t know about the Alabama Housing Finance Authority’s programs, some of which offer assistance to working households who don’t qualify for traditional Section 8. According to the Alabama Housing Finance Authority, the agency administers several programs targeting moderate-income residents, including HOME Investment Partnerships funds and state-level rental assistance pilots. Clint had never heard of the agency.
When I asked Clint what his search process actually looked like, he described something many readers will recognize: forty minutes on a Tuesday night after a 10-hour shift, two browser tabs open, a phone call that went to a voicemail that had never been set up. “You’re tired, you know? You want to do the right thing but everything about finding help is set up to make you give up,” he said.
What He Eventually Found — and What It Cost Him to Wait
Clint signed the new lease in November 2025. He didn’t feel like he had a real alternative. Moving would have cost first month, last month, and a security deposit — money he didn’t have liquid. He and Deja restructured their budget, cutting their grocery spending and pausing contributions to a small savings account they’d been building for a house down payment someday.
In January 2026, a cousin mentioned the Jefferson County Community Action Agency, which connects residents with HUD-approved housing counselors at no cost. Clint finally called. The counselor there told him about a utility assistance program he qualified for — the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which freed up about $90 a month he had been spending on electricity. It wasn’t the same as rent relief, but it wasn’t nothing.
He’s currently on a waitlist for a formal HUD housing counseling session, where a certified counselor will review his full financial picture and identify any programs he still qualifies for. According to HUD’s housing counselor locator, these sessions are free and cover rental assistance options, lease negotiation strategies, and longer-term housing stability planning.
Where Things Stand Now — and What Clint Regrets
When I sat down with Clint for the final part of our conversation, the shop was quiet. It was mid-afternoon on a Tuesday, and he said Tuesdays were his slowest day. He had a notebook on the counter with some numbers written in it — shop revenue targets, projected expenses through June. The handwriting was careful and organized. The plan was there. The energy to execute it was something he said he was still working on finding.
“I’m not in crisis,” he was careful to say. “We’re paying the bills. Deja is almost done with school. But I just feel like I’ve been treading water for six months and I didn’t have to be, maybe, if I had known the right door to knock on.”
His next lease renewal comes up in October 2026. That gives him roughly six months to work with the housing counselor, document his business income more formally, and understand what, if any, programs might apply to him then. He’s also considering whether the shop’s declining revenue warrants a conversation with the Small Business Administration — a separate thread he hadn’t pulled yet.
What stays with me from that Tuesday afternoon in Birmingham is not the dollar amounts — though the $315-a-month hit to someone running a small business on thin margins is genuinely serious — but the texture of exhaustion Clint described. He is a person who makes plans. He had a notebook. He had the Google searches. He just didn’t have a guide, and the system he needed help from doesn’t come with one.
He told me one last thing as I was gathering my things to leave, almost as an aside, in the tone people use when they’re saying something they’ve been sitting with for a while. “I just want to get to a point where I’m building something again, not just holding it together. I think that’s the part that gets you — when you can’t tell the difference between those two things anymore.”
Clint Ramos is still in Avondale. He’s still cutting hair. And he’s still figuring it out — six months at a time.
Related: When Overtime Vanished and Rent Jumped $380 a Month, One Restaurant Manager Found Help She Didn’t Know Existed
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