City Covid Rent Fund So Far Pays Out … $0

Eight weeks after launching an $800,000 Covid-related rental-aid program, the city hasn’t distributed a cent — leaving renters like Schneska Murphy struggling to figure out how to qualify.

The city first announced the $800,000 housing aid effort on Sept. 2. The programs announced that day included the Coronavirus Assistance and Security Tenant Landlord Emergency (CASTLE) program and the Eviction Resolution Fund.

CASTLE aims to provide up to $3,000 in rental help — paid directly to landlords — for eligible low-income families who have struggled to make ends meet during the Covid-19 pandemic. The program also makes available up to $4,000 to local homeowners to assist with mortgage modification or forbearance. ERF aims to support renters already in housing court who have been affected by Covid by covering up to $3,000 in back rent.

According to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Independent and an interview with the acting head of the city department that oversees the program, the city has yet to distribute any money in housing aid through the program.

Murphy lives with her daughter and teenage son and two grandchildren, ages 6 and 7, in a second-floor, three-bedroom apartment on Maple Street in the Edgewood neighborhood.

With two months of back rent piling up thanks to lost work and unexpected family illnesses, Murphy said, she jumped at the opportunity to apply for the city’s new Covid-era rental assistance program.

Several weeks into the application process, Murphy remains stymied by what she sees as too onerous of an application — while the program as a whole, launched over a month and a half ago, has yet to distribute a single dollar to renters or homeowners in need. 

During a Monday morning interview on her apartment building’s front porch, in between a call to her son’s probation officer and helping her grandchildren navigate online school, Murphy spoke of her frustrations in trying to complete the application forms required for the CASTLE program.

Murphy’s complaints about the application process provide one potential answer for the relatively slow start.

She showed the Independent a checklist of required application documents to be submitted by tenants interested in participating in the CASTLE program.

Those include a 2019 tax return and W‑2, copies of four paystubs or proof of unemployment, and copies of a written lease, utility bill, rent statement from a landlord, and driver’s license.

That’s not to mention the separate legal disclosure, non-collusion affidavit, affidavit of eligibility, and demographic form — among others forms — that CASTLE applicants must also submit in full.

“Can I split myself in half?” Murphy asked with exasperation. ​“I’m a strong Christian. God is my reliever. I know it’s just a trial I’m going through, and it will be over soon.”

Amidst all of the other hardships she and her family have faced before and during the pandemic, the application became one more point of stress.

“If you’re gonna help the people,” she said about the CASTLE program, ​“then help them.”

Local legal aid attorney Amy Marx agreed. The New Haven Legal Assistance Association has worked with Murphy, among other tenants, to help her navigate the CASTLE application process.

“It’s great that the City set up the tenant relief programs but that was many, many weeks ago,” she said in an email statement sent to the Independent Monday. ​“Now, LCI needs to streamline the process and put any hand on deck needed to get money into tenants’ and landlord’ hands immediately. Tenants facing eviction in the midst of the pandemic cannot be asked to slog through long applications, collect lots of documentation, and wait weeks to get access to the rent relief funds. If the City does not pick up the pace in distributing funds, there will be a crisis of homelessness, foreclosures, and market destabilization.”

378 Sent Out; 23 Returned; 16 Under Review

Livable City Initiative (LCI) Acting Director Arlevia Samuel told the Independent in a Friday morning phone interview that the city has been busy doing outreach and helping applicants navigate the process for what is still a relatively new program.

Since the creation of CASTLE in early September, she said, 448 people have reached out to the city by email or phone to inquire about getting housing aid.

Samuel said that her office has sent out 378 applications; only 23 have been filled out and returned so far. She said that seven of the applicants subsequently proved not to qualify for the program — because they could not show a verified income disruption due to Covid-19, they owed no back rent after March, or the applicant’s landlord did not want to participate in the program.

Samuel said that her department currently has 16 CASTLE applications under review.

“The program has been in place for less than 60 days,” Samuel said. ​“There are no changes that need to be made to the program. We worked really, really hard on the program” before it launched to make sure the application process wasn’t onerous and that the aid was targeted at those most in need.

“You can’t predict how people will react to things,” she added. ​“We can push it out. But we need the people to come in, too. We need them to qualify for the programming. We can’t go get it for them. It moves according to the applicant’s pace.”

While declining to comment on Murphy’s specific application out of respect for the renter’s privacy, Samuel did say that LCI remains in close contact with every applicant. Because this program is funded with federal CARES Act dollars, there are certain eligibility requirements that must be met and forms that must be filled out before a tenant can receive financial aid, she said.

She said the city is still very much accepting applications for housing aid through CASTLE. Interested applicants can call the city at 203 – 946-7090 or email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

The program is limited to New Haven residents whose incomes do not exceed 80 percent of the area median income (AMI). According to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), that comes to $75,500 for a family of four for the New Haven-Meriden metro area. Applicants must also show a verified income disruption due to Covid-19, and show that a tenant is not facing a court-ordered eviction filed prior to March 11.

Click here and here to learn more about the program’s eligibility requirements and terms of assistance.

Murphy: ​“Just Bills And Bills And Food”

Murphy, a North Carolina native who moved north to New Haven with her family when she was just 5 years old, said that the past three years have been particularly challenging.

In late 2017 and early 2018, her brother and then her mother died in relatively quick succession, leaving her alone as the primary caregiver for her two kids and two grandkids. Murphy said she has spent most of her working life as a certified nursing assistant, but that a 2017 car crash left her with a permanent spinal injury and unable to continue in her line of work.

She and her family were evicted from a Hill apartment in 2018. They subsequently spent nearly a year homeless and, at points, living out of her car.

They found the three-bedroom apartment on Maple Street in early 2019, and will hit their two-year anniversary living at that apartment this upcoming February.

Before the pandemic hit, Murphy said, she ran a home daycare service for children of extended family members. She stopped that work soon after the start of Covid-19 in March out of a concern that the kids she looked after or their parents might expose her immediate family to Covid, or vice versa.

Since then, she has relied on her daughter’s paycheck from her job at Yale New Haven Hospital to help cover most of the $1,280 per month rent.

While no one in her immediate family has contracted Covid, they have experienced quite a few medical emergencies.

Her daughter was recently diagnosed as having a kidney stone, she said, and has had to miss a few days of work because of the extreme pain and nausea from that ailment. Her 15-year-old recently had to have an emergency appendectomy.

Murphy said that she has fallen roughly two months behind on rent since March.

“We’re trying to catch up with things now,” she said. ​“But it’s hard. We’re trying to maintain the rent we’re in now, assuming we get the help with the back rent.”

“We’ve got no money to play with,” she added. ​“We barely can buy clothes. It’s just bills and bills and food.” Murphy said that she and her family have picked up a few boxes of food in recent weeks from pantries held at the Dixwell police substation on Charles Street and at Roberto Clemente Academy in the Hill.

Murphy said she sees the city’s rental relief program as helping her stay current during a uniquely challenging year, and as hopefully helping her realize her goal in the near future of moving her family out of their current apartment and into a house of their own.

“I want somewhere decent to live,” she said. ​“My goal is to get a home. Right now, I’m just trying to hold on.”

As for the CASTLE application itself, Murphy said that she had to have her daughter print out a copy of the set of CASTLE forms at her work. Then she filled out what she could. She had her daughter scan the work back online, then submit it to LCI. For the past few weeks, she said, she’s been going back and forth with the city about different parts of her application that were incomplete. She’s currently trying to find her 2019 tax returns, which she hopes will be the last form needed before her final interview with LCI about her eligibility for the program.

Murphy said she has also received help from the New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA) in filling out her application and advocating for city assistance.

Meanwhile, her 15-year-old son and her two grandchildren are in online school. Her daughter is working, but struggling with a kidney stone. Murphy is trying to stay up to date on utilities and rent each month, with a pandemic still going on that has upended every aspect of everyone’s life.

“It’s a mental thing,” she said about dealing with the regular stresses of life along with that of Covid. ​“You’ve got to hold on and try to deal with everything you can do. Because what else can we do?”

Mayor: Eviction Prevention A Top Priority

In a Friday afternoon interview, Mayor Justin Elicker told the Independent that the primary purpose of the CASTLE program is to make sure that families are not evicted from their homes during the ongoing pandemic. It was announced in early September, when the governor’s statewide eviction moratorium was set to expire on Oct. 1.

That eviction moratorium — at least in regards to the filing of new evictions for nonpayment of rent — has subsequently been extended to Jan. 1, 2021, relieving the pressure a little bit on the city to rush money out the door through CASTLE.

“Each application goes through a rigorous review process,” Elicker said about CASTLE. ​“It’s important for us to make sure that we’re following that process to ensure the integrity of the funding program and to make sure there’s no misuse.”

“This program is to ensure that people don’t get evicted,” he stressed. Given that the eviction moratorium has been extended, renters under review for city-provided financial support through CASTLE are not right now on the brink of losing their homes.

He said that, from his understanding, ​“our application process is not onerous.” He said he gets weekly updates on the program from LCI, and that the city is in the process of reaching out to people who expressed interest in the program but never returned an application to figure out why they didn’t follow through on submitting.

State Rental Assistance Program Reopened; 750 Families Helped

The state’s Temporary Rental Housing Assistance Program (TRHAP), meanwhile, reopened on Monday after being shuttered to new applicants from Aug. 28.

Click here to read more about the state rental assistance program, which started accepting applications against starting Monday morning.

The state rental aid program launched in mid-July with $10 million — later updated to $20 million — worth of funding for Connecticut tenants in need.

The state paused accepting new applications as of Aug. 28 after nearly 30,000 people applied, and nearly 7,400 applications made it to the pre-approval process. As of late September, only two families had received aid through the program, according to the Connecticut Mirror.

DOH spokesperson Aaron Turner told the Independent by email Tuesday morning that the number of people helped through TRHAP has increased dramatically in he past month and a half.

“There are 5,778 prequalified submissions seeking assistance,” he wrote. ​“4,400 of those have been referred to a housing counseling agency or Connecticut Housing Finance Authority to complete the process to actually receive assistance meaning that they are actively working with landlords and tenants to reach a contract. Due to the rapid scaling of payments, more than $2 million will have been distributed by this week. Approximately 750 households have received assistance.”