Appily stated1/28/2024 ![]() “A lot of the ways that we have designed welfare programs are pretty dated,” said Peter Hepburn, assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University–Newark and a research fellow at the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. “It’s all on the people making the decisions, how experienced they are in housing and welfare, how willing they are to engage with communities, and how much they want people to maintain safe housing.” The variation between states is “not even about how progressive the state is,” she said, citing the example of Texas, “a red state that is actually performing pretty well” in getting the emergency assistance out. Foley added that some states believe tenants will feign eligibility requirements without the check provided by the landlord. There’s an apprehension around it,” she said. “The fear of fraud or misuse makes a lot of state agencies fear that inspector general will pull funds at a later point in time when they’re audited. Emma Foley, a research analyst at the National Low Income Housing Coalition, says these concerns are largely unfounded and stem from a general suspicion around welfare programs that permeates state and local agencies. But in many states it tends to be viewed with distrust because of fears that tenants will exploit the system. In fact, the Treasury Department put out guidance at the end of August explicitly allowing for it. ![]() Gregory Heller, executive director of the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority, said that his city used Cares Act funding to give rent money to tenants in the fall of 2020, before ERAP, and “figured out it was much simpler.”ĭirect-to-tenant rental assistance doesn’t seem like a radical idea, and it isn’t. In Philadelphia, for example, disbursements have been faster with the direct-to-tenant option. ![]() In the face of that recalcitrance, some localities (Washington, D.C., and most of Texas and California, along with a handful of counties in other states) are just giving cash to tenants if the landlord can’t be reached or won’t participate. She said Riseboro is now working with a marketing agency to craft messages encouraging landlords to get their tenants to apply and assuage their concerns. Mirtha Santana, chief program officer at Riseboro Community Partnership, said that calls to their hotline about ERAP have dropped significantly and fewer tenants are applying. The nonprofit partners helping with ERAP in New York are spending a fair number of resources reaching out to landlords, money that could go toward other measures to improve the program, like language help or wider outreach. Landlords don’t like to be told what to do,” said Jack Newton, director of the Public Benefits Unit at Bronx Legal Services. Another major reason is that they cannot raise rent for another year. “If the landlord does accept the funds from ERAP, he cannot evict a tenant for 12 months. Many property owners have refused to accept the money because it comes with paperwork requirements for them and additional tenant protections. But landlord cooperation remains one of the biggest problems. As the program stalled, the Treasury Department tried to ease the process by allowing self-attestation of income, in lieu of documents. Under ERAP, tenants can get up to $15,000 to pay 12 months of back rent and utility bills for the period starting March 13, 2020, as well as three months of future rent, if they lost work due to the pandemic and meet a certain income-level threshold. ![]() But as of late August, just over $5 billion of that had been distributed. With emergency eviction moratoriums ending, many more people are likely to be turning to ERAP, which promised to disburse $46.5 billion to cover for struggling renters. Luckily, Chhaya CDC, a Queens nonprofit, stepped in and took care of correspondence with the landlord so Hassan didn’t have to meet him. ERAP, which was launched in January 2021 by the Treasury Department, seemed like a godsend, though Hassan was hesitant to apply because it required landlord participation. There were no riders for his taxi, and his income shriveled. When Covid-19 hit, Manhattan turned into “a graveyard, not a soul there,” Hassan said. I mean, what would my landlord do if I didn’t pay the rent for a year because I lost my job?” he said. “I wasn’t scared by the court case, but I was scared for my family. His landlord had taken him to court already, in 2020. By the time he received an email last week informing him that his application for New York’s federally funded Emergency Rental Assistance Program had been approved, he owed 12 months of back rent for his apartment in Queens, where he lives with his family of four. It took Ziaul Hassan, a New York City taxi driver, four months to hear back after he applied for emergency rent help because the pandemic had devastated his business.
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