Federal Rental Assistance Is Running Out, With Tenants Still in Need

New York, for example, requested a billion dollars in added funding but stands to receive only $27 million, or 3 percent of what it asked for.

John Mitchell used rental assistance to remain in his Philadelphia apartment when he fell behind on rent, after losing his job as a restaurant server because of pandemic closures.

But now, with the surge of the Omicron variant, he is back in the same position. The restaurant where he works closed after a staff member tested positive for the coronavirus. Mr. Mitchell got sick, too, and now he is behind on rent again while he looks for a new job and cares for his mother, who is struggling with health issues.

“This has just been hell,” he said.

Landlords are facing uncertainty, too.

“This program is a lifeline — it’s how we right the ship, if we will, on housing during the pandemic,” said Greg Brown, senior vice president of governmental affairs at the National Apartment Association. Owners who cannot receive additional rental assistance will be left with mounting debts, he said. “There clearly is more need than there were dollars allocated.”

For months, emergency rental assistance dollars sat largely unspent, with states and cities struggling to set up programs to distribute the funds, and tenants and landlords bogged down with cumbersome application requirements. Through July, just $5.1 billion of the $46.5 billion had been distributed.

But as the White House and the Treasury Department, which oversees the program, put pressure on states to spend the funds or else see them used by other states, the pace sharply quickened.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/us/federal-rental-assistance-evictions.html