Jewel Burgess, 40, first signed up for emergency rental assistance in Washington, DC, last year after being released from her job of delivering meals to the city’s Office of Aging. She never received an answer about whether she was approved or denied for rent assistance, like some of her friends, she said, and was unable to pay her $ 1,002 rent, utility bills and other basic necessities in the few hundred dollars. that she receives in unemployment benefits.
“At this point, I am paralyzed; I feel like I’m between a rock and a hard place, ”said Burgess. “I don’t know how, from now on, what they will do to help me, if they have already helped me or received money in my name – I don’t know anything. I’m just sitting here waiting and praying to God that I don’t get an eviction notice on my door or someone comes knocking on my door saying that I have to leave my apartment because I’m being evicted. “
As the coronavirus pandemic drags on in its second year, millions of people like Burgess are struggling to pay their rent and bills, with many putting hope in federal aid money being sent to state and local governments for rent assistance payments. short term. These emergency rental assistance programs, which were created and expanded with funding from the CARES Act in March, were designed to provide desperately needed financial support for families and tenants who have suddenly lost their income.
The first round of rental assistance used money from a $ 150 billion flow from the Treasury Department known as the Coronavirus Relief Fund, which gave local and state governments money that could be spent on a wide range of emergency programs. An extra $ 25 billion was approved in December, although the Treasury included guidelines that made it difficult for tenants to access money. Some of these guidelines have been revised, and President Joe Biden has also asked lawmakers to approve an additional $ 30 billion in rent and assistance for public services as part of the broader $ 1.9 trillion stimulus package currently under negotiation.
But many rental assistance programs have been woefully underutilized, in part because of bureaucratic hurdles and the reality of fund management. The implementation of assistance programs depends on individual states and cities, and many local governments have trouble reaching those in need. Some jurisdictions have had to reallocate millions to pay people’s rent. In Arizona, rental assistance was expanded, but the state received only about 330 applications, Fox 10 Phoenix reported.
Burgess said she was disappointed by the government’s failure to distribute aid to many of the people who lost their jobs during the pandemic. “They come on the news and say, ‘We have programs available, we have money and funding available’, and then you try to contact these people to get funding and help, and then you have to qualify, you have to meet requirements, you have to have documentation, ”he said. “All kinds of things they ask before you even get help. It is all a process and, in that process, what should I do to make sure I have what I need? “
Some rental assistance programs in cities like Chicago paid the grants directly to tenants who could prove that they lost their job or hours of work and found themselves unable to pay their rent as a result – and were effective in doing so. But many other jurisdictions struggled to spend the millions set aside for rental assistance before the initial December 30 deadline and were forced to lose it to other programs.
As the deadline approached in Atlanta, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms proposed to cut in half the $ 22 million allocated for the city’s pandemic assistance program. In Pennsylvania, about $ 108 million of the $ 175 million allocated to mortgage relief and relief never reached the people who defended them and was redistributed to the state Department of Corrections for coronavirus-related payroll expenses.
Photo: Paul Frangipane / Bloomberg via Getty Images
As of December 2020, almost one in five renters across the country was behind on rent, according to recent data from the Census Bureau. The Biden government announced in February that it would extend the foreclosure moratorium and mortgage tolerance. The federal eviction moratorium, which has been extended to the end of March, and a tangle of state and local protections have protected tens of millions from losing their homes.
But housing advocates are concerned about those falling into the cracks, saying the current moratorium and scattered relief programs are not strong enough to protect tenants from displacement.
“There has never been a comprehensive set of solutions in place to protect tenants and keep them in stable housing during the pandemic,” said Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “There has been a patchwork of resources and protections at the federal, state and local levels that have kept most tenants hosted in a stable manner, but there has been an alarming number of evictions that have occurred despite the protections.”
While the federal ban on eviction helped keep many tenants in their homes last year, Yentel noted that self-eviction moratoriums “were never the final solution”. These orders only postpone evictions as the amount of unpaid rent increases. A January report from Moody’s Analytics estimated that Americans owe about $ 57 billion in arrears.
One of the biggest obstacles to the distribution of money so far has been the refusal of the owners to participate.
Some of the emergency rental assistance programs that struggled to distribute aid lacked staff or the ability to review all incoming requests, while some programs were delayed by additional layers of bureaucracy. Costly documentation requirements and complicated application processes – which vary from place to place – are also barriers to assistance, excluding some of the families that were most in need.
But one of the biggest obstacles to the distribution of money so far has been the refusal of the owners to participate. To receive the money, landlords had to agree to certain conditions and protections for tenants to participate in the program, including a promise not to increase rent for a certain period and not to evict them. Some landlords openly declined, refusing payments to pay their tenants’ rent, while others did not respond.
Homeowners and homeowners, Burgess added, say they need to collect the rent so they can continue to keep a roof over their heads, but “what makes it different from the people who live on the properties they are renting?”
Paul Williams, a former policy administrator for the Chicago Housing Department, said Chicago lawmakers had previously established an emergency rental assistance program that paid about $ 2 million directly into tenants’ bank accounts. When federal funds arrived, it was easy to simply inject more money into your existing program.
“I think a lot of those other cities and states that were doing this, they just have inertia within their program and policy design where every time they gave rental assistance, they did it this way,” said Williams. “And giving money directly to tenants, people are afraid to do it for all the reasons why people are afraid to give money to the poor.”
“We also heard these arguments in Chicago. Some councilors were skeptical about the program because they thought, ‘What if a tenant doesn’t need 100% of the rent and buys a flat screen?’ ”, He continued. “Well, what if we give the money directly to the owner, and he doesn’t use all the money for maintenance and mortgage and buys himself a flat screen?”
The last pot of money, a $ 25 billion rental assistance fund approved by Congress in December, came with new guidelines that effectively banned the direct approach to the aid distribution tenant.
A tenant can still request rental assistance and obtain the money, but only after his landlord has been contacted by the city and the city has confirmed that the landlord has refused or has not responded. Many of these agencies have complicated application processes and therefore need to answer owners’ questions over the phone. “Cities don’t have the staff to do this properly,” said Williams. “Many cities are just hiring companies with about 10 employees to do the entire application process.”
The Treasury Department in late February revised the guidance that Steven Mnuchin’s Treasury Department established on the last day of the Trump administration. The revised rules allow tenants to self-certify on most eligibility requirements and give the landlord 14 days to respond before the money is sent to the tenant. Williams said the updated rules are an improvement, but it remains to be seen whether programs in different states will be able to do direct service to the tenant well.
“Congress has already provided $ 25 billion, which is a really substantial and historic amount of rent assistance that will go a long way,” said Yentel. “But it is not enough and we need more.”