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    Eviction Moratorium Set to Lapse as Biden Aid Effort Falters

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    The administration made a last-ditch, failed appeal to extend the moratorium to buy more time for states to distribute rental aid.A nationwide moratorium on residential evictions is set to expire on Saturday after a last-minute effort by the Biden administration to win an extension failed, putting hundreds of thousands of tenants at risk of losing shelter, while tens of billions in federal funding intended to pay their back rent sit untapped.The expiration was a humbling setback for President Biden, whose team has tried for months to fix a dysfunctional emergency rent relief program to help struggling renters and landlords. Running out of time and desperate to head off a possible wave of evictions, the White House abruptly shifted course on Thursday, throwing responsibility to Congress and prompting a frenzied — and ultimately unsuccessful — rescue operation by Democrats in the House on Friday.The collapse of those efforts reflected the culmination of months of frustration, as the White House pushed hard on states to speed housing assistance to tenants — with mixed results — before the moratorium expired. Hampered by a lack of action by the Trump administration, which left no real plan to carry out the program, Mr. Biden’s team has struggled to build a viable federal-local funding pipeline, hindered by state governments that view the initiative as a burden and the ambivalence of many landlords.As a result, the $47 billion Emergency Rental Assistance program, to date, disbursed only $3 billion — about 7 percent of what was supposed to be a crisis-averting infusion of cash.Adding to the urgency, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh warned last month, when the Supreme Court allowed a one-month extension of the eviction moratorium to stand, that any further extensions would have to go through Congress. But there was little chance that Republicans on Capitol Hill would agree, and by the time White House officials asked, only two days remained before the freeze expired, angering Democratic leaders who said they had no time to build support for the move.“Really, we only learned about this yesterday,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had publicly and privately urged senior Biden administration officials to deal with the problem themselves.“What a devastating failure to act in a moment of crisis,” said Diane Yentel, the president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which had pressed for an extension of the moratorium. “As the Delta variant surges and our understanding of its dangers grow, the White House punts to Congress in the final 48 hours and the House leaves for summer break.”The federal eviction moratorium, put in place by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in November, was effective, reducing by about half the number of eviction cases that normally would have been filed since last fall, according to an analysis of filings by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University.Advocates have argued it is also a public health imperative, because evictions make it harder for people to socially distance.The lapse of the federal freeze is offset by other pro-tenant initiatives that are still in place. Many states and localities, including New York and California, have extended their own moratoriums, which should blunt some of the effect. In some places, judges, cognizant of the potential for a mass wave of displacement, have said they would slow-walk cases and make greater use of eviction diversion programs.On Friday, several government agencies, including the Federal Housing Finance Agency, along with the Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development and Veterans Affairs Departments, announced that they would extend their eviction moratoriums until Sept. 30.Nonetheless, there is the potential for a rush of eviction filings beginning next week — in addition to the more than 450,000 eviction cases already filed in courts in the largest cities and states since the pandemic began in March 2020.An estimated 11 million adult renters are considered seriously delinquent on their rent payment, according to a survey by the Census Bureau, but no one knows how many renters are in danger of being evicted in the near future.Bailey Bortolin, a tenants’ lawyer who works for the Nevada Coalition of Legal Service Providers, said the absence of the moratorium would lead many owners to dump their backlog of eviction cases into the courts next week, prompting many renters who received an eviction notice to simply vacate their apartments rather than fight it out.“I think what we will see on Monday is a drastic increase in eviction notices going out to people, and the vast majority won’t go through the court process,” Ms. Bortolin said.The moratorium had been set to expire on June 30, but the White House and C.D.C., under pressure from tenants groups, extended the freeze until July 31, in the hopes of using the time to accelerate the flow of rental assistance.A crash effort followed, led by Gene Sperling, who was appointed in March to oversee Mr. Biden’s pandemic relief efforts, including emergency rental assistance programs created by coronavirus aid laws enacted in 2020 and 2021.Mr. Sperling, working with officials in the Treasury Department, moved to loosen application requirements and increase coordination among the state governments, legal aid lawyers, housing court officials and local nonprofits with expertise in mediating landlord-tenant disputes.In June, 290,000 tenants received $1.5 billion in pandemic relief, according to Treasury Department statistics released last week. To date, about 600,000 tenants have been helped under the program.But administration officials concede the improvements have not progressed quickly enough. Over the past week, Mr. Sperling; Brian Deese, the director of the National Economic Council; Susan Rice, Mr. Biden’s top domestic policy adviser; and Ms. Rice’s deputy on housing policy, Erika C. Poethig, made a late plea for Mr. Biden to extend the freeze, according to two people familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.Dana Remus, the White House counsel, expressed concerns that an extension was not a legally available option, and other officials suggested it could prompt the Supreme Court to strike down the administration’s broad use of public health laws to justify a range of federal policies, and their view prevailed, the officials said.In a statement Friday evening, Mr. Biden sought to put the onus on local officials to provide housing aid, saying “there can be no excuse for any state or locality not accelerating funds to landlords and tenants.”“Every state and local government must get these funds out to ensure we prevent every eviction we can,” he added.In the past week, Wally Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary overseeing the program, had sent letters to officials in several localities, including New York, warning that their share of the cash could be taken back if it was not spent by mid-September, according to two senior administration officials. The White House is especially concerned about the sluggish pace of spending in Florida.Emily A. Benfer, a professor at Wake Forest University who specializes in health and housing law, said it was not entirely fair to blame the states, because many local governments had to build their rental assistance programs from scratch.It has also been difficult to gain buy-in from landlords, who are required to fill out complex financial forms and follow strict eligibility rules. Some simply do not want to, especially if they have more informal arrangements with tenants. In addition, many landlords and tenants do not even know the aid program exists.Big and small landlords are nearly unanimous in their disdain for the C.D.C.’s moratorium and the patchwork of state and local moratoriums that have augmented it.“They just said ‘You cannot evict and that’s it,’” said Shaker Viswanathan, 65, who owns 16 units in San Diego. “The tenants are the ones that they are trying to take care of, and not anybody else. We still have to make mortgage payments.”If there is one point both tenants and landlords agree on, it is that gaining access to the money remains difficult, and the process must be streamlined.“These applications are just a bear,” said Zach Neumann, a lawyer who runs the Covid-19 Eviction Defense Project in Denver, which has received dozens of calls and emails from renters panicked by the end of the freeze. “It adds a ton of time onto the process and that increases the risk for tenants.”Evictions can be personal crises for all involved — so traumatic, in fact, that many tenants will often leave without resisting just to avoid the ordeal, according to marshals and sheriffs responsible for showing up at people’s doors, hauling out their belongings and locking them out.Kristen Randall, a constable who oversees evictions in the Tucson area, has been reaching out to people on both sides to figure out what happens next.It is a mixed, cloudy picture. Some landlords who are waiting for tenants to get rental assistance are in no rush to evict. Others are planning to take legal action next week to enforce judgments against tenants they have already taken to court.Ms. Randall spent part of Friday visiting renters who faced imminent eviction.“It has been an emotional day,” she said.Ms. Randall repeated what she has been telling those tenants: “When you leave on your own, it is better than me showing up and locking you out.”Ron Lieber More

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    The chairman of a House coronavirus subcommittee vows to investigate eviction practices by corporate landlords.

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    Just days before the federal moratorium on evictions is set to expire, lawmakers scrutinized the actions of corporate landlords that have filed tens of thousands of actions seeking the removal of tenants during the pandemic.Representative James E. Clyburn, the chairman of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, said the hearing was the opening salvo of an investigation into what he called “unjustified eviction practices” by some large landlords. Mr. Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina, said he was disturbed by reports that some large property owners had moved to evict renters for failing to pay rent, even as the government works to distribute tens of billions of dollars in emergency rental assistance funds.Last week Mr. Clyburn sent letters to four corporate landlords that he said were particularly aggressive in going after lower-income tenants and Black and Latino renters. “Evictions by corporate landlords have been widespread in minority communities,” he said.Representatives for those landlords did not speak at the hearing, but several housing advocates did.Jim Baker, the executive director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a nonprofit that has been tracking eviction filings in a handful of large counties, said that corporate landlords, rather than so-called mom-and-pop landlords, had accounted for the majority of eviction filings. Corporate landlords had filed at least 75,000 evictions across the half-dozen large counties the group has tracked since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention imposed a nationwide eviction moratorium in September, Mr. Baker said.The moratorium is credited with cutting the number of eviction actions filed by landlords roughly in half, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University.But the effects have been mixed: State and local courts have been divided on the details of the moratorium, with some ruling that landlords could file eviction actions for nonpayment of rent and were prohibited only from removing such tenants. Other courts have permitted evictions if they are for violations of a housing complex’s rules and regulations.With the moratorium expiring this week, housing advocates estimate that roughly 11 million adult renters are vulnerable to being evicted because they are behind on their rent. Nearly a half-million people are behind in New York City alone, according to an analysis of census data by the National Equity Atlas, a research group associated with the University of Southern California.Housing advocates fear there will be a rush of eviction filings once the moratorium ends. Some are concerned about how slow the federal government has been to dole out roughly $45 billion in federal rental assistance. A little over $1.5 billion has been paid out nationwide, the Treasury Department said last week.Emily A. Benfer, a professor at Wake Forest University who specializes in health and housing law, said in an interview that the relief had been slow to trickle out partly because many local governments had had to build rental assistance programs from scratch. The process for applying can be cumbersome because of language and technology barriers, she added.Diane Yentel, the president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told the subcommittee that Congress should consider extending the moratorium to allow more time for the emergency rental money to be disbursed. She said some states had allocated less than 5 percent of the money they had gotten from the federal government.Republicans on the subcommittee criticized the C.D.C. moratorium, calling it an unconstitutional power grab that imposed financial hardships on landlords. Joel Griffith, a researcher with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy group, said the moratorium “eroded private property rights” and interfered with the ability of local courts to enforce local housing laws.The committee has asked the corporate landlords to respond to Mr. Clyburn’s letter by Aug. 3. More

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    ‘We’re Suffering’: How Remote Work Is Killing Manhattan’s Storefronts

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    #styln-signup .styln-signup-wrapper { max-width: calc(100% – 40px); width: 600px; margin: 20px auto; padding-bottom: 20px; border-bottom: 1px solid #e2e2e2; } A big shift toward working from home is endangering hundreds of locally owned Manhattan storefronts that have been hanging on, waiting for life to return to the desolate streets of Midtown and the Financial District. The […] More

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    Federal Aid to Renters Moves Slowly, Leaving Many at Risk

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    Congress allocated $25 billion in December and another $21 billion in March to help people who fell behind on rent during the pandemic. Little has reached landlords or tenants.WASHINGTON — Four months after Congress approved tens of billions of dollars in emergency rental aid, only a small portion has reached landlords and tenants, and in many places it is impossible even to file an application.The program requires hundreds of state and local governments to devise and carry out their own plans, and some have been slow to begin. But the pace is hindered mostly by the sheer complexity of the task: starting a huge pop-up program that reaches millions of tenants, verifies their debts and wins over landlords whose interests are not always the same as their renters’.The money at stake is vast. Congress approved $25 billion in December and added more than $20 billion in March. The sum the federal government now has for emergency rental aid, $46.5 billion, rivals the annual budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.Experts say careful preparation may improve results; it takes time to find the neediest tenants and ensure payment accuracy. But with 1 in 7 renters reporting that they are behind on payments, the longer it takes to distribute the money, the more landlords suffer destabilizing losses, and tenants risk eviction.Millions of tenants are protected from eviction only by a tenuous federal moratorium that faces multiple court challenges, omits many households and is scheduled to expire in June.“I’m impressed with the amount of work that unsung public servants are doing to set up these programs, but it is problematic that more money isn’t getting out the door,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor at New York University who is studying the effort. “There are downstream effects if small landlords can’t keep up their buildings, and you want to reach families when they first hit a crisis so their problems don’t compound.”Estimates of unpaid rents vary greatly, from $8 billion to $53 billion, with the sums that Congress has approved at the high end of the range.The situation illustrates the patchwork nature of the American safety net. Food, cash, health care and other types of aid flow through separate programs. Each has its own mix of federal, state and local control, leading to great geographic variation.While some pandemic aid has flowed through established programs, the rental help is both decentralized and new, making the variation especially pronounced.While Charleston has started a local rent assistance program, South Carolina has $272 million to spend and has not begun taking applications.Cameron Pollack for The New York TimesAmong those seeking help is Saundra Broughton, 48, a logistics worker outside Charleston, S.C., who considered herself safely middle class in the fall, when she rented an apartment with a fitness center and saltwater pool. To her shock, she was soon laid off; after her jobless benefits were delayed, she received an eviction notice.“I’ve always worked and taken care of myself,” she said. “I’ve never been on public assistance.”A judge gave Ms. Broughton 10 days to leave her apartment. Only a last-minute call to legal aid brought word of the federal moratorium, which requires tenants to apply. She rushed to the library to print the form with 24 hours to spare. “But I still owe the money,” she said, about $4,600 and counting.If Ms. Broughton lived in nearby Berkeley County, she could have sought help as early as March 29. In Charleston County, a few miles away, she could have applied on April 12. But as a resident of Dorchester County, she must apply through the state, which has $272 million in federal money but is not yet taking applications.“Why are they holding the money?” she said. “I have thousands of dollars of debt and could be kicked out at any moment. It’s a very frightening feeling.”The huge aid measures passed during the early stages of the pandemic did not include specific provisions to help renters, though they did give most households cash. But hundreds of state and local governments started programs with discretionary money from the CARES Act, passed in March 2020. These efforts disbursed $4.5 billion in what amounted to a practice run for the effort now underway with 10 times the money.Lessons cited include the need to reach out to the poorest tenants to let them know aid is available. Technology often posed barriers: Renters had to apply online, and many lacked computers or internet access.The demand for documentation also thwarted aid, as many people without proof of leases or lost income could not finish applications. Some landlords declined to participate, perhaps preferring to seek new tenants.Despite rising need, programs in Florida and New York, financed by the CARES Act, returned tens of millions of unspent dollars to the states. By the time Congress passed the new program in December, nearly 1 renter household in 5 reported being behind on payments.The national effort, the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, is run by the Treasury Department. It allocates money to states and also to cities and counties with populations of at least 200,000 that want to run their own programs. About 110 cities and 227 counties have chosen to do so.The program offers up to 12 months of rent and utilities to low-income tenants economically harmed by the pandemic, with priority on households with less than half the area’s median income — typically about $34,000 a year. Federal law does not deny the aid to undocumented immigrants, though a few states and counties do.Modern assistance seems to demand a mix of Jacob Riis and Bill Gates — outreach to the marginalized and help with software. Progress slowed for a month when the Biden administration canceled guidance issued under President Donald J. Trump and developed rules that require less documentation.Other reasons for slow starts vary. Progressive state legislators in New York spent months debating the best way to protect the neediest tenants. Conservatives legislators in South Carolina were less focused on the issue. But the result was largely the same: Neither legislature passed its program until April, and neither state is yet accepting applications.“I just don’t know why there hasn’t been more of a sense of urgency,” said Sue Berkowitz, the director of the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center. “We’ve been hearing nonstop from people worried about eviction.”There is no complete data on how many tenants have been helped. But of the $17.6 billion awarded to state governments, 20 percent is going to states not yet taking applications, though some local programs in those states are. Florida (which has $871 million), Illinois ($566 million) and North Carolina ($547 million) are among those that have yet to start.“The pace is slow,” said Greg Brown of the National Apartment Association, who emphasized that landlords have mortgages, taxes and maintenance to pay.In a recent talk at the Brookings Institution, Erika Poethig, a housing expert on the White House Domestic Policy Council, praised the “unprecedented amount of rental assistance” and said “the federal government only has so much ability” to encourage faster action.Accepting applications is only the beginning. With $1.5 billion to spend, California has attracted 150,000 requests for help. But of the $355 million requested, only $20 million has been approved and $1 million paid.Texas, with $1.3 billion to spend, started quickly, but the company it hired to run the program had software failures and staffing shortages. A committee in the state House of Representatives found that after 45 days, the program had paid just 250 households.By contrast, a program jointly run by the city of Houston and Harris County had spent about a quarter of its money and assisted nearly 10,000 households.Not everyone is troubled by the pace. “Getting the money out fast isn’t necessarily the goal here, especially when we focus on making sure the money reaches the most vulnerable people,” said Diane Yentel, the director of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.Given the challenge, she said, “I think it’s going OK.”She points toward a program in Santa Clara County, Calif., that won praise for its outreach last year. Many of the people it served spoke little English or lacked formal leases to submit. Now, with $36 million to spend under the new program, it opted for weeks of additional planning to train 50 nonprofit groups to find the poorest households“Giving away money is actually quite hard,” said Jen Loving, who runs Destination: Home, a housing group leading the campaign. “All the money in the world isn’t going matter if it doesn’t get to the people who need it.”In Charleston, S.C., housing became a subject of concern after a 2018 study found the area had the country’s highest eviction rate. Charleston County ran three rounds of rental relief with CARES Act money, and the state ran two.The second state program, started with $25 million in February, drew so many applications that it closed in six days. But South Carolina is still processing those requests as it decides how to distribute the new federal funds.Antonette Worke is among the applicants awaiting an answer. She moved to Charleston from Denver last year, drawn by cheaper rents, warmer weather and a job offer. But the job fell through, and her landlord filed for eviction.Ms. Worke, who has kidney and liver disease, is temporarily protected by the federal eviction moratorium. But it does not cover tenants whose leases expire, as hers will at the end of next month. Her landlord said he would force her to move, even if the state paid the $5,000 in overdue rent.Ms. Worke is temporarily protected by a federal moratorium on evictions, but her lease is set to expire at the end of the month.Nora Williams for The New York TimesStill, she said the help was important: A clean slate would make it easier to rent a new apartment and relieve her of an impossible debt. “I’m stressing over it to the point where I’ve made myself sicker,” she said.Moving faster than the state, Charleston County started its $12 million program two weeks ago, and workers have taken computers to farmers’ markets, community centers and a mall parking lot. Christine DuRant, a deputy county administrator, said the aid was needed to prevent foreclosures that could reduce the housing stock. But critics would pounce if the program sent payments to people who do not qualify, she said: “We will be audited,” possibly three times.Latoya Green is caught where the desire for speed and accounting collide. A clerk who lost hours in the pandemic, she owes $3,700 in rent and utilities and is protected by the eviction moratorium only until her lease expires next month.She applied for help on the day the county program started but has not completed the application. She said she is unsettled by the emails requesting her lease, which she lacks, and proof of lost income.Still, Ms. Green does not criticize Charleston County officials. “I think they’re trying their best,” she said. “A lot of people run scams.”With time running short, she added: “I just hope and pray to God they’ll be able to assist me.” More

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    Pandemic’s Toll on Housing: Falling Behind, Doubling Up

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesSee Your Local RiskVaccine InformationWuhan, One Year LaterAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPandemic’s Toll on Housing: Falling Behind, Doubling UpEviction moratoriums don’t keep arrears from piling up, and aid to renters may not reach the most vulnerable.Angelica Gabriel and Felix Cesario of Mountain View, Calif., moved out of the bedroom they shared with their two youngest children so they could rent it out. They now sleep in the living room.Credit…Sarahbeth Maney for The New York TimesFeb. 6, 2021Updated 2:54 p.m. ETAs the pandemic enters its second year, millions of renters are struggling with a loss of income and with the insecurity of not knowing how long they will have a home. Their savings depleted, they are running up credit card debt to make the rent, or accruing months of overdue payments. Families are moving in together, offsetting the cost of housing by finding others to share it.The nation has a plague of housing instability that was festering long before Covid-19, and the pandemic’s economic toll has only made it worse. Now the financial scars are deepening and the disruptions to family life growing more severe, leaving a legacy that will remain long after mass vaccinations.Even before last year, about 11 million households — one in four U.S. renters — were spending more than half their pretax income on housing, and overcrowding was on the rise. By one estimate, for every 100 very low-income households, only 36 affordable rentals are available.Now the pandemic is adding to the pressure. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia showed that tenants who lost jobs in the pandemic had amassed $11 billion in rental arrears, while a broader measure by Moody’s Analytics, which includes all delinquent renters, estimated that as of January they owed $53 billion in back rent, utilities and late fees. Other surveys show that families are increasingly pessimistic about making their next month’s rent, and are cutting back on food and other essentials to pay bills.On Friday, as monthly jobs data provided new evidence of a stalling recovery, President Biden underscored the housing insecurity faced by millions. The rental assistance in his $1.9 trillion relief plan, he said, is essential “to keep people in their homes rather than being thrown out in the street.”Bobbing above the surface of a missed payment, the most desperate are already improvising by moving into even more crowded homes, pairing up with friends and relatives, or taking in subtenants.That is the case with Angelica Gabriel and Felix Cesario, residents of a two-story apartment complex in Mountain View, Calif., largely inhabited by cooks and waitresses and maids and laborers — the kinds of workers hit hardest by the pandemic.With their incomes reduced, Ms. Gabriel, a fast-food worker, and her husband, a landscaper, recently moved out of the bedroom they shared with their two youngest children, 6 and 8. They now rent the bedroom to a friend of a friend, while the couple and the kids sleep on a mattress in the living room. (Two daughters, 14 and 20, continue to share the other bedroom.)The arrangement has kept them current by bringing in $850 toward the $2,675.37 monthly rent, which Ms. Gabriel reeled off to the penny.“We weren’t able to pay the rent by ourselves,” she said in Spanish. “Suddenly the hours fell. You couldn’t pay, buy food.”Such changes are not directly reflected in rent rolls or credit card bills, but various studies show that disrupted and overcrowded households have a host of knock-on effects, including poorer long-term health and a decline in educational attainment.Reflecting the broader economy, the pain in the U.S. housing market is most severe at the bottom. Surveys of large landlords whose units tend to be higher quality and more expensive have been remarkably resilient through the pandemic. Surveys of small landlords and low-income tenants show that late fees and debt are piling up.One measure of relief came when Mr. Biden extended — by two months — a federal eviction moratorium that was scheduled to expire at the end of January, as states and cities also moved to extend their own eviction moratoriums. In addition, $25 billion in federal rental aid approved in December is set to be distributed.But for every million or so households who are evicted in the United States each year, there are many more millions who move out before they miss a payment, who cut back on food and medicine to make rent, who take up informal housing arrangements that exist outside the traditional landlord-tenant relationship.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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    Use It or Lose It: Tenant Aid Effort Nears a Federal Cutoff

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyUse It or Lose It: Tenant Aid Effort Nears a Federal CutoffEmergency pandemic funding to help renters must be distributed by Dec. 30. But getting the money to those who need it is no small task.Gregory Heller of the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation is scrambling to get emergency aid into tenants’ hands before a federal deadline.Credit…Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesDec. 15, 2020Updated 7:15 p.m. ETFor several months, Gregory Heller, an official with a Philadelphia nonprofit group, has grappled with an unusual problem. He had $60 million in rental aid to help low-income tenants weather the pandemic — and a whole lot of trouble spending it.Designing questionnaires, verifying bank statements, processing stacks of paperwork: There is a wide administrative gap between the goal of getting money to renters who need it and the reality of cutting a check to their landlord. People like Mr. Heller are trying to bridge it.He is among hundreds of public servants and nonprofit employees nationwide who are scrambling to unload hundreds of millions in federal aid for tenants before a Dec. 30 deadline. They don’t have enough money to address a growing rental housing crisis yet are struggling to pay out what they have — an undertaking that has become even more urgent as other federal emergency programs, including unemployment benefits and an eviction moratorium, are also about to expire.Working from a home office in front of a laptop whose spreadsheets represent roofs over families’ heads, Mr. Heller, senior vice president for community investment at the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation, is so engulfed in his efforts that he now supplements the work of his support staff by taking calls from tenants and landlords on his cellphone. That way he can pitch in on answering questions and review applications on the fly, part of a rush to stave off a wave of evictions, one tenant at a time.“I get calls all day, every day,” he said. “I’ve basically joined the help desk.”Philadelphia is a case study in the simple-but-not-easy task of helping tenants with the rent. Social programs are often a partnership in which cities provide funding and lay out rules but delegate the execution to quasi-governmental nonprofit organizations like Mr. Heller’s. Like most places, Philadelphia isn’t close to satisfying the need for help. But through rounds of rejiggering and three phases of funding — each with its own maze of rules and requirements — Mr. Heller’s group built a team to distribute aid, whittled down the processes that delayed it and ultimately concluded that the best way to help was the most straightforward: Give the money directly to renters.“There’s a societal belief that poor people can’t spend money the right way, and I think it’s important to start questioning that assumption,” Mr. Heller said.Almost from the moment the pandemic spread across the United States, advocacy groups have warned that the economic fallout could cause mass displacement of low-income tenants. In response, more than 400 state and local governments have used money from the federal CARES Act to set up funds to cover at least $4.3 billion in rental assistance — money that has helped tenants pay their bills and landlords stay current on their mortgages, according to a database set up by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a policy group.But now many jurisdictions are reporting trouble spending it, and with barely two weeks left in the year, they are on pace to have more than $300 million left over, according to the coalition’s database. In a pattern that predated the pandemic, the programs have been complicated by bureaucratic hurdles, competing budget demands and a reluctance among landlords to take part.There was shifting federal guidance on how CARES Act money could be spent. States passed legislation that piled local rules on top of the federal rules. Each layer was ostensibly created to improve programs — preventing fraud, making sure the money went to the neediest tenants — but added numerous hurdles for both tenants and landlords, and in the end cost time.“In trying to build bulletproof programs, you build programs that take a long time to get off the ground or simply don’t work because they are too clunky,” said Brad Gair, a principal with Witt O’Brien’s, an emergency-management consulting firm that has helped about a dozen state and local governments create rental funds.Hoping to distribute the remaining aid before it is forfeited, many states and cities are simplifying applications and moving money from nonprofits that can’t process the aid fast enough to those that can. Others are redirecting the funds to different purposes, lest they go unspent.Philadelphia is a case study in the simple-but-not-easy task of helping tenants with the rent. Like most places, it isn’t close to satisfying the need.Credit…Hannah Yoon for The New York TimesNone of this is for lack of demand. In interviews, more than a dozen officials of nonprofit groups and housing administrators reported a deluge of applications, while reports show tenants are piling up credit card bills, back rent and loans. Moody’s Analytics estimates that by the end of the year some 11 million lower-income renters will be about $70 billion in arrears.Tenant advocates, landlord organizations and local-government associations have called on Congress to extend the Dec. 30 deadline. “The idea of reverting that money back to the Treasury just as the eviction moratoriums expire and renters are on the brink is absurd and cruel,” said Diane Yentel, chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.Like most U.S. cities, Philadelphia had a housing problem long before the pandemic. Rents are lower than in markets like New York and San Francisco, but the burden on tenants is still high. In 2018, about a third of the city’s tenants spent at least half of their pretax income on rent, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.Despite this, federal aid for housing has been declining for decades, part of a continued disinvestment in the social safety net. The line for the federal Section 8 program, which gives vouchers to low-income renters, is more than a decade long in Philadelphia. At the same time, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant Program is giving the city less than half of the funding that it received in 1995, adjusted for inflation.Looking to expand aid, Mayor Jim Kenney announced in early March that the city would budget $50 million for a five-year program to assist low-income households. It would also run an experiment, giving one group of households rental vouchers while another group of families got unrestricted cash assistance.The coronavirus ended that by blowing a hole in the city’s budget. But the CARES Act added some $60 million in new funds, some through the state and some in direct federal support to cities. The catch was that it had to be spent quickly. And that’s where Mr. Heller’s group came in.Mr. Heller, 39, has spent his career in the nonprofit world and has been a consultant on neighborhood development projects in two dozen cities. In 2016, he was appointed to run the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority, a role he still holds, and last year he joined the Philadelphia Housing Development Corporation.Business & EconomyLatest UpdatesUpdated Dec. 15, 2020, 4:17 p.m. ETEuropean Central Bank will lift ban on bank dividends, a sign of cautious optimism.Top congressional leaders met to discuss a stimulus deal and a year-end spending bill before the deadline on Friday.European truck makers say they will phase out fossil fuel vehicles by 2040.Money can come in an instant, but running new programs involves a bunch of mundane but important tasks. Mr. Heller’s organization could not take applications or distribute aid until it had built new information technology infrastructure, with a web portal for claims and 18 full-time employees to review applications and field calls.The first phase was rolled out on May 12 and covered up to $2,500 in rent over three months. Within four days the city had 13,000 applicants. About a third were approved, consuming $10 million of the eventual $60 million.At the same time, Pennsylvania used CARES Act money to start a separate rental-aid program. This was confusing to landlords and tenants, because while that money was also distributed through nonprofits like Mr. Heller’s, it had different criteria from Philadelphia’s program. The major distinction was that the state program would cover no more than $750 in rent, and to receive it property owners had to agree to forgive the balance, and to waive late fees and back rent. This caused a number of landlords — especially in Philadelphia, where the median rent is $1,600 — to balk. And without landlords’ consent, tenants couldn’t get the aid.Victor Pinckney, a landlord and former president of HAPCO, a city landlords’ group, said the reason was simple: He and others didn’t want to take less than the market rent, or give up the right to collect back payments. “It was a no-brainer,” he said.The result was that tenants like Christy Lee Nicholas, who spent two days filling out the questionnaire and assembling pay stubs and bank statements, didn’t even have their applications looked at because the city couldn’t process them without landlord forms.Ms. Nicholas, 42, made about $1,400 a month from a part-time teaching job but was laid off during the pandemic. She recently applied to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, and pays $1,100 a month in rent. She is one month behind on rent and applied for the city’s program, but her landlord didn’t send in his own forms.Linda Harkins applied to the city’s rental assistance program, but was denied because her landlord did not send in a form.Credit…Hannah Yoon for The New York Times“I got an email that said, ‘Sorry, but unfortunately participation requires your landlord,’” she said.This problem went far beyond Philadelphia. Vincent Reina, an urban planning professor at the University of Pennsylvania, recently found that in some cities as many as half of tenants could not get landlords to cooperate with rental assistance programs. The reasons included not wanting to deal with bureaucracy and an unwillingness to comply with terms like waiving back rent or losing the right to evict tenants collecting aid.“We’ve consistently created programs where owners have ultimate veto power over whether a tenant can access the housing assistance that they’ve applied for and need,” Mr. Reina said.To coax more landlords into the program, Philadelphia used its own CARES Act money to augment state rental funds, allowing it to cover up to $1,500 a month in rent. That took care of an additional $30 million, but even with a higher rent cap, 37 percent of landlords still refused to take part.With the end of the year approaching, the city gave Mr. Heller’s organization $20 million for a third program for tenants. This time, instead of having separate applications from landlords and tenants, the organizers asked people who weren’t able to get aid from the first two rounds to reapply — for a cash payment.“We don’t want to penalize them just because their landlord won’t play ball,” Mr. Heller said.One of them was Linda Harkins. Ms. Harkins is a 67-year-old retiree who makes about $1,200 a month from a pension and Social Security, and until recently supplemented it with about $600 a month from a part-time job with the Census Bureau. When her position was cut, Ms. Harkins applied to the city’s rental assistance program.Her application, like Ms. Nicholas’s, was denied because her landlord did not send in a form. Last month, she applied for the new direct-aid program. Ms. Harkins is hoping the check will arrive by Christmas, or at least the first of the month.With the new cash program, Mr. Heller said he was confident that all $60 million would be spent by year’s end. But the need for help will continue.“We now have a whole program set up to funnel millions of dollars to tenants and landlords,” he said. “This issue predates the pandemic and it’s going to continue after. The question is whether we’re going to continue to fund it, or not.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More