Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo
Applicants wait with their paperwork at a rental assistance fair at the Mississippi Trade Mart in the State Fairgrounds, July 24, 2021, in Jackson, Mississippi.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the La Raza Community Resource Center in the Mission District of San Francisco this week, one of the local entities administering the emergency rental assistance program. The director of the community center and a representative from the mayor’s office touted their successes, noting that “a commitment” for assistance had been granted to almost everyone who has applied.
Stressing the value of implementation, Pelosi said in brief remarks, “An initiative isn’t successful unless people take advantage of it.”
This has been precisely the problem with the $46.5 billion in emergency rental assistance Pelosi and her colleagues authorized in two tranches dating back to last December. As I’ve written, in theory this should be more than enough to account for all rental debt in the country, but barely any of it has gotten out to struggling renters, thanks to a litany of problems inherent in the way the law was written.
The program was outsourced to a patchwork of inexperienced state and local entities that never delivered rental relief before, and this led to inefficient coordination, a shocking lack of awareness that help even existed, confusing paperwork burdens, and the hesitant participation of landlords, who under initial guidelines had to sign off on assistance first. By June 30, six months into the program, only around 6 percent of the total funds had been distributed; 40 state, city, and county programs had not spent a dime. Updated numbers from the National Low Income Housing Coalition show about $4.2 billion spent as of August 11, up from around $3 billion in the Treasury report for June. This is still agonizingly slow. At this rate, the full $46.5 billion would not be depleted until 2028.
This is why the looming eviction resumption, after a hastily constructed moratorium ends on October 3, matters at all: The program that would relieve eviction risk is dysfunctional. But a better option has been tested in several localities. It involves just giving needy people money.
The program was outsourced to a patchwork of inexperienced state and local entities that never delivered rental relief before.
TOMÁS RIVERA IS WITH Chainbreaker Collective in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It initially started as a bikeshare program in the mid-2000s, before expanding to cover transit, housing, and gentrification. With the COVID crisis came anti-displacement work, bolstered by moratoria at the federal, state, and city levels. But beyond setting up tenant hotlines, Chainbreaker was instrumental in a direct-payment program that predated the rental assistance debacle.
Working with an immigrant justice organization called Somos un Pueblo Unido and the city of Santa Fe, Chainbreaker organized a program last November called the CONNECT Fund. The city used $6 million in CARES Act funds available for coronavirus-related expenses to offer $3,000 one-time payments to residents suffering economic hardship and threat of eviction.
The application was relatively simple, with just an income threshold and self-attestation of hardship. Money was routed directly to bank accounts or on a debit card. “When people talk about slow distribution [of rental assistance], that was not our experience with direct cash assistance,” Rivera said. “We got rid of $3 million in a couple weeks.”
While there were no strings attached to the funds, it was clear from communicating with recipients later that the $3,000 was primarily used to pay rent, the main expense in their households. But not tying it to rent was critical, because it removed all the requirements to confirm rental debt, and separated the program from landlords. That speeded relief into people’s hands. And evictions in Santa Fe were subsequently cut in half in 2020, despite the pandemic economic pain.
“It gives people a basic amount of money to keep themselves going,” said Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber in a press conference on Thursday. “It reduces stress. And it gives them respect, dignity, and agency, and tells them we trust you to do the right thing for your family.”
The difference between this program and what’s going on with rental assistance cannot be more stark. As of May, New Mexico’s rental assistance program had spent more on marketing than on aid. “It’s going to landlords, not renters,” Rivera explained. “You have to apply through a website or smartphone. There are language issues, lagging bureaucracy issues. A lot of people got no response, they are saying that they couldn’t wait and left, they self-evicted.”
Rebecca Kueber, a Chainbreaker member, lost her restaurant job in the pandemic and couldn’t keep a new job, as she had to take care of three kids who were going to school online. As her rental debt accumulated, she tried to navigate RentHelpNM, the state rental assistance program. She told reporters Thursday that she couldn’t get the application through “because my landlord hasn’t given me a list of months of rent due.” (If landlords can throw out current renters, they can command higher rents for new tenants. That’s why hinging rental assistance on self-interested landlords is so shortsighted.) Further documentation of economic impact from COVID-19, risk of housing instability, and income limits has been a challenge to obtain.
Kueber preferred the direct assistance program, she said, because it reflected government saying to the public, “We trust the decisions of people. We don’t have to watch what they do with every penny.”
Alorah Donaleski, a 19-year-old living with her boyfriend in Kansas City, Missouri, couldn’t continue at her job at Target during the pandemic, because she was at high risk for contraction due to fibromyalgia, a skeletal disability. Her boyfriend was fired a month ago, and they face the risk of eviction from nonpayment of the $700-a-month rent. Neither has yet been able to acquire unemployment insurance; Missouri has said that Donaleski’s quitting doesn’t make her eligible for benefits.
Donaleski sought rental assistance, but ran into a roadblock. “I wasn’t able to fill out the applications because all of them required a lease,” she said. Her landlord copy-pasted a lease off the internet that was not accepted as valid by the local utility company. Donaleski and her boyfriend asked for a new lease, but the landlord never got around to it. So despite living in the single-family residence, the lack of a key document makes the couple ineligible for rental assistance, at a time when they really need it.
“These systems are so hard for you to go through,” Donaleski said. Asked what she would tell policymakers who put together the rental assistance program, she replied, “They need to put themselves in other people’s shoes.”
It’s clear that rental assistance will not be converted into a workable program in the two months before the latest moratorium ends October 3.
The Treasury Department has labored to improve rental assistance, but has run up against fundamental issues embedded in the system. In May, Treasury released guidance stating that, if landlords rejected assistance, the money would have to be offered directly to renters, and that agencies could offer assistance to renters first. Just last week, Treasury published sample forms that would make applying for assistance simpler. But the program is so sprawling, these messages have not gotten through nationwide. Even the federal systems set up to steer applicants to their proper local program are not broadly helpful, and once you get there, requiring statements from employers and landlords to qualify for relief adds another burden.
A similar program to Santa Fe’s popped up last year in Houston, which Treasury has ironically held out as a national model for its rental assistance program. A partnership with Catholic Charities Help delivered $60 million in funds provided by Harris County, Texas, to 50,000 eligible families. The program went from creation to completion in three months, and the paperwork burden on applicants was low.
The Catholic Charities program, like Santa Fe’s CONNECT, also happened outside of emergency rental assistance. So did the various rounds of payments sent directly during the pandemic through the IRS. All of these programs have a simple eligibility requirement rather than double checks of pay stubs and other forms of screening. Nobody had to show a lease or get their landlord to write a letter. Staff burdens are lower when the eligibility is relatively automatic, and errors on forms are less widespread. “We see that people, when they’re given money directly, they’re able to put destiny into their own hands,” said Y. Frank Southall, lead organizer with Jane Place, a New Orleans–based community organization.
There have been a few success stories on rental assistance; Texas and Virginia in particular appear to be doing a decent job. But a direct assistance program, if the experiences of Santa Fe and Houston carried over, could have delivered full relief to families, months before any eviction moratorium deadline. You would have thought that the success of the stimulus payments might have reoriented thinking on how to deliver this kind of emergency relief. You would have been wrong.
MOVING FORWARD, IT’S CLEAR that rental assistance will not be converted into a workable program in the two months before the latest moratorium ends October 3 (much sooner if landlord trade groups from Alabama and Georgia, who have sued to toss out the CDC ordinance, get their way). And Chainbreaker and the research organization PolicyLink estimate that 5,700 families are at risk of eviction when all eviction moratoria end. “Rental assistance is absolutely necessary but is not going to solve the problem,” said Chainbreaker’s Tomás Rivera.
The organization has endorsed a community land trust on 64 city-owned acres in Santa Fe, which if approved would become the largest in the United States. These nonprofit land trusts take permanent ownership of a plot, and residents enter into long-term leases, with most proceeds of individual property sales going back to the trust to preserve affordability and prevent price spikes.
Rivera calls it “one of the many solutions, no silver bullet but a silver buckshot.” It provides community control and shields residents from the vicissitudes of the housing market. “We want to allow people to have direct stewardship over land and housing,” Rivera said. “You don’t have to make a choice between disinvestment and displacement, that’s a false choice.”
Santa Fe is also experimenting with a guaranteed income program, a $400-per-month stipend tied to students with families at the local community college. While cash assistance isn’t a full solution to inequality and other societal challenges, the experience with rental assistance suggests that broader, simpler cash programs are far more effective, and vital in an emergency situation.
During the pandemic, protecting tenants has been scattershot and rather ineffective. The moratoria were incomplete and didn’t stop all evictions, and funding to pay back rent has barely flowed. But this indifference to renters for the crime of not owning a house predates the pandemic, and the burden on the poor for the crime of being eligible to receive federal benefits does too. If we drew longer-term lessons for facilitating relief and putting citizens in less of a vulnerable position, we would not proceed with the same old programs that let people slip through the same old cracks.
