$10M Rental Assistance Program Launched; Tenant Advocates Wary

Starting Wednesday morning, eligible low-income tenants who have struggled to pay rent because of the pandemic can apply to receive up to $4,000 in federally-funded, state-administered housing support.

Local tenant advocates warned that the $10 million program contains just a fraction of the money needed to help keep Connecticut renters in their homes during the Covid-19 crisis — and that the bureaucratic burden of the application process will likely lead to many needy residents falling through the cracks.

The program itself is called the Temporary Rental Housing Assistance Program (TRHAP), and will be run by the state Department of Housing (DOH).

Beginning at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, interested applicants can call 1 – 860-785 – 311 to talk with a call center representative about their eligibility for the rental assistance program, and about submitting the various forms necessary to apply for support.

The launch of TRHAP comes roughly two and a half weeks after Gov. Ned Lamont first said on June 29 that he would create the program, and two days after the governor signed an executive order formally bringing the rental assistance program into existence.

“Housing stability is critical to the health and well-being of Connecticut residents, and COVID has had a significant impact on the ability of many of our families to pay the costs of their housing and maintain that stability,” state housing Commissioner Seila Mosquera-Bruno said in a June 29 press release about the rental assistance program and several other new forms of state housing assistance. ​“These initiatives, working in coordination with our partners across the housing industry, including legal services, developers, landlords, lenders and our social service providers, will provide a great opportunity to promote stability, and help our families to weather this epidemic.”

Using $10 million provided to the state through the $2.2 trillion federal CARES Act, TRHAP will provide up to $4,000 in total rental assistance for eligible households that earn 80 percent or less of the area median income (AMI); that do not already receive any kind of state or federal rental assistance, such as Section 8 rental subsidies; and that are current on their rent and are not facing a court-ordered eviction filed prior to March 11, 2020.

Eligible applicants must also prove to the state that their ability to pay full rent has been directly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic by, for example, a job loss, reduction in work hours, the closure of a store, restaurant, or office, or the need to miss work to care for a home-bound child or parent.

Renters approved for support can receive up to $4,000 in total, and no more than $1,000 any given month, which can be applied towards rent due between March 1, 2020 and March 1, 2021.

The state will pay the TRHAP funds directly to the renter’s landlord. Eligible tenants who must pay a minimum of 30 percent of their gross income towards rent, with TRHAP covering the rest.

“This program will address the economic impact on rental housing stability,” reads the program’s statement of objectives. ​“The state will be offering assistance to renters in order to prevent eviction actions. This will address both the arrearage caused by income loss and/or greater expenses due to Covid-19 that have negatively impacted a household’s ability to pay their full monthly rent over the next number of months.”

Click here for a complete overview of the program, and here to access the various application materials.

The program is part of a suite of state-wide housing assistance programs that Lamont announced at the end of June. In addition to TRHAP, those include a $5 million eviction prevention program for tenants currently in the process of being evicted; $10 million in mortgage relief for homeowners negatively impacted by Covid-19 and whose mortgages are not federally insured (federally insured mortgage holders are covered by relief provided by the CARES Act); $4 million in rapid rehousing funds to help cover security deposits and initial rent for people exiting homelessness; $2.5 million in rental assistance for undocumented immigrants; and $1.8 million for reentry and rehousing assistance for the formerly incarcerated.

Those $33 million worth of CARES Act-funded, state-determined housing assistance programs, along with the extension of the state’s eviction moratorium through Aug. 22, have helped earn Connecticut the highest score in the nation (a 4.28 out of 5.00) from Princeton’s Eviction Lab in its 50-state overview of pandemic-era housing policy and renter protections.

“The Governor of Connecticut has issued an executive order establishing a moratorium on evictions, foreclosures, and utility shutoffs during the pandemic, and instituted a grace period to repay rental debt, and reached a deal with mortgage lenders to delay mortgage payments temporarily,” the Connecticut report card reads. ​“The court system has also taken action to suspend eviction, foreclosure, and other civil cases. Orders in Connecticut constitute some of the strongest protections for renters during the pandemic. However, without further action on rental debt, Connecticut could still see a surge of evictions soon after the state of emergency expires.”

The rental assistance program comes at a time when the country’s patchwork of eviction moratoriums, pre-existing affordable housing crisis, and soon-to-expire federal unemployment boost could lead to upwards of 20 million to 28 million Americans evicted by the end of September, according to American Bar Association Task Force Committee on Eviction Chair Emily Benfer. A recent survey by the site Apartment List found that a third of Americans did not make their full rent payment on time in July.

“We Have To Keep People Where They Are”

New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA) Director of Litigation Shelley White (pictured) raised similar concerns about the mid-to-long term adequacy of the state’s rental assistance program during a phone interview with the Independent Tuesday afternoon.

“We don’t believe that this amount will be nearly enough to keep people out of housing court,” she said, ​“which is the goal of this whole program.”

She referenced a letter and petition that 150 organizations signed and sent to the governor on June 23 in anticipation of the announcement of the $10 million rental assistance program. The petition’s signatories included 29 different New Haven-based organizations, including legal aid, A Place to Nourish Your Health (APNH), Columbus House, Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen, Fair Haven Community Health Care, Newhallville Community Action Network (NCAN), and Youth Continuum.

In that petition, the authors argued that the state should spent closer to $140 million on rental assistance — more than 10 times the current $10 million allocation. That’s because Connecticut received $1.4 billion in federal support from the CARES Act, and because of how serious the consequences of being evicted are, especially during a pandemic.

“Eviction is not just a symptom of poverty; it causes poverty,” they wrote. ​“An eviction record impedes a renter’s ability to secure safe, decent housing, without which children are put at risk for lead poisoning, asthma, and other health issues. Eviction has serious societal costs too. Evictions result in academic loss to children whose educations are disrupted by missing or switching schools. Evictions negatively affect mental health, wellness, and decision-making. Destabilization of housing strains city services and can lead to increased use of emergency rooms, which is particularly dangerous in a pandemic.

“A new flood of families without a place to live will be a giant step backwards in our fight to control the pandemic.”

White reiterated many of those concerns in her assessment of the rental assistance program, while also praising the governor for putting it together at all as well as for pushing out the eviction moratorium from July 1 to Aug. 25.

“It’s incredibly important to keep people housed during this time period as we’ve tried to flatten the curve,” she said. ​“Now, it’s important to keep people in place so that the curve can stay flattened.”

In addition to her criticism of the total dollar amount of the program, White zeroed in on its eligibility criteria as potentially causing the program to miss out on helping the neediest tenants.

For one, the state will be accepting applications in three tiers designed to prioritize those most in need of rental assistance.

The first tier, open from July 15 through July 28, will be reserved for eligible households who have been denied unemployment benefits and/or denied the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, who have at least one minor in their household, and who make 60 percent or less of the AMI.

White said that she would have liked to have seen that AMI threshold dropped even lower to 40 percent for the first tier of applicants. According to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the New Haven-Meriden metro area’s AMI for 2019 was $92,800. Sixty percent of that is $55,680, while 40 percent is $37,120. That latter number is much closer to what the median City of New Haven household actually earns, which, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is $41,142.

White also cautioned against requiring households to prove that they have been denied unemployment assistance in order to be eligible for this program. With historic levels of unemployment assistance filings during the pandemic, some people have simply not yet heard back from the state Department of Labor, she said. While some may have been denied for a technical application error, like filling in their maiden name on the computer’s application form. And others, she said, may have never applied for unemployment at all, whether because they erroneously think they aren’t eligible or because they could not navigate the largely English-language DOL website.

“The virus hasn’t gone away,” she said. ​“It’s still lurking in our communities.”

And for that reason, the state needs to build off of its current renter protections to do even more to keep tenants in their apartments and landlords solvent so as not to have a flood of people kicked out of their homes come late August.

“We have to keep people where they are,” she said. ​“We have to make sure that the landlords get paid and that the neighborhoods stay stable.”

“Very Burdensome And Pretty Confusing”

Keren Salim, a labor attorney with New Haven legal aid and an organizer with the tenant advocacy group Cancel Rent CT, criticized the new rental assistance program as woefully inadequate and inaccessible.

“They’ve created another bureaucratic application process that’s not going to be fulfilling the needs of all renters,” she said during a Tuesday afternoon interview with the Independent.

Based on her and her fellow community organizers’ conversations with renters throughout the state, she said, ​“We’re seeing people really being behind on rent.”

That’s in part because of the challenges people have faced getting on and staying on unemployment, she said.

Salim said she’s currently working with three clients who all high risk for suffering serious adverse consequences if they contract Covid-19, and who all work in high exposure jobs. They’ve all applied for unemployment, she said, and are either still waiting to hear back from the Department of Labor or are currently going through hearing processes because their employers have called them back to work and they don’t feel safe returning. Even if they did, Salim said, her clients worry about not being able to afford childcare if and when they have to return to their jobs.

She described the TRHAP application process as ​“very burdensome and pretty confusing,” particularly in requiring that applicants prove that they have been denied unemployment assistance.

Salim said that the solution that she and Cancel Rent CT are advocating for is a simpler, and more universal one: ​“Rent should be forgiven,” she said. ​“It shouldn’t be this burdensome process that tenants have to go through. They should just cancel rent, figure out a way to make sure the eviction moratorium is continued,” and then provide relief directly to landlords to make sure they can stay afloat during this crisis.