City Launches $800K Housing Aid Fund

Low-income tenants struggling to make rent during the Covid-19 crisis have a new local lifeline — thanks to the launch of a city rental assistance and eviction prevention program targeted at helping vulnerable families stay housed during the pandemic.

Mayor Justin Elicker and top state and city officials announced the New Haven Emergency Housing Response initiative during a Wednesday morning press conference on the second floor of City Hall.

The new program is funded with $800,000 from the city’s federal CARES Act allocation.

The program earned praise from a local legal aid housing attorney — as well as skepticism about the city housing code enforcement agency charged with administering it (see more below).

Elicker, city Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli, and Livable City Initiative (LCI) Executive Director Serena Neal-Sanjurjo said Wednesday that the new program consists of three parts — all designed to help people stay in their homes and out of the eviction and foreclosure pipelines during the ongoing public health emergency.

“We are in a crisis in terms of housing here in the city,” Neal-Sanjurjo said, even as the governor’s eviction moratorium has been extended through October 1.

With roughly 10,000 New Haveners currently on state unemployment, Piscitelli said, ​“It will be one of the most significant things we face as a city and as a state over the course of the fall and winter, dealing with families that are facing true economic crisis.”

Renters and homeowners interested in applying for local housing assistance can call the city at 203 – 946-7090 or email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

“We’re Doing The Best With Our Resources”

The new initiative creates a Coronavirus Assistance and Security Tenant Landlord Emergency program (CASTLE), which will provide direct financial assistance for low-income renters and homeowners who have suffered economic hardship during the pandemic.

Neal-Sanjurjo said that applicants must be New Haven residents, they cannot already have a judgment for eviction entered prior to March 2020, and and they must have experienced a verified income disruption due to Covid-19. Examples of such financial hardships include being laid off or furloughed, having a reduction in hours of work or pay, having their place of work close, and not being able to work in order to care for a home-bound elderly person or a school-age child.

Eligible applicants must also make no more than 80 percent of the area median income (AMI), which according to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) comes to $75,500 for a family of four for the New Haven-Meriden metro area.

Neal-Sanjurjo said that the program will provide up to $3,000 in rental assistance for eligible families, with the money paid directly by the city to the renter’s landlord. LCI staffers will help tenants who call the above phone number come up with a landlord-tenant workout plan with their respective landlords before determining how much to distribute in each case. They’ll also offer assistance to homeowners who are behind on their mortgage payments.

The new local initiative would also use part of that $800,000 total allocation to help tenants who are already involved in housing court but do not yet have an eviction filed against them cover back rent and come up with a deal with their landlords that would allow them to stay in their home.

Finally, the new response program’s hotline at 203 – 946-7090 will allow for LCI staffers to connect needy tenants with a variety of other housing support services, including referrals to housing counselling agencies and mediators working with legal aid and the Urban League, Neal-Sanjurjo said.

The LCI director said that the financial assistance program should help around 300 New Haven families with this current tranche of funding. That’s just a small portion of the roughly 5,600 New Haven residents the city believes are currently experiencing some kind of housing-related economic hardship.

“I don’t think the federal government, the state government, or the city have adequate resources to fund the need,” Elicker said. ​“We don’t know of how large this problem will be once the eviction moratorium ends” in October.

He described the new rental support program as one step in a broader series of actions taken by City Hall to make sure people remain housed during the pandemic. That includes relocating 324 previously homeless individuals to new permanent housing over the past six months and working on a soon-to-be-announced inclusionary zoning ordinance that would require developers set aside a certain percentage of apartments at affordable rents in new housing complexes, he said.

The governor’s negotiations with private banks to provide mortgage relief for homeowners and the October 1 state eviction moratorium extension represent further state actions designed to prevent an eviction and foreclosure crisis from sweeping the state, he added.

“The need is much greater than what we’re able to provide,” Elicker said. ​“We’re doing the best with our resources.”

State Rental Help: Still In Process

The local rental assistance program isn’t the only pot of money that low-income tenants in need can apply for during the pandemic. There’s also the state Temporary Rental Housing Assistance Program (TRHAP), which launched in July and is run by the state Department of Housing (DOH). Gov. Ned Lamont initially put $10 million into the program, and then added another $10 million as the renters from throughout the state applied en masse for help.

DOH spokesperson Aaron Turner told the Independent by email after Wednesday’s presser that, as of Aug. 28, the state housing department had received a total of 7,375 submissions from renters looking for help through TRHAP.

He said that, of that total, DOH has determined 6,139 to be prequalified for assistance.

“To date, there are 700 households actively working with the 11 HUD Certified Housing Counseling Agencies to complete their paperwork, including contracting with their landlords,” Turner wrote. ​“We anticipate additional referrals for assistance very soon.”

He said the department estimates that, when these 700 households successfully come under contract with the state, they should receive approximately $2.8 million out of the program’s total $20 million.

Not a dollar of that money has actually gone out to renters yet, however, as ​“they are in the process of getting under contract,” Turner said.

He said DOH hopes to get the first TRHAP payments out the door by Friday or early next week.

CDC Directive? ​“Assessing Its Impact Now”

Wednesday’s City Hall announcement also came one day after the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a new directive ordering a nationwide eviction moratorium for renters who make under $99,000 a year and can attest to not being able to pay full rent despite best efforts at securing assistance. 

The order, coming on the heels of President Donald Trump’s executive order this summer that encouraged the CDC to contemplate an eviction moratorium, seemed to catch some state agencies off guard.

State housing commissioner Seila Mosquera-Bruno said during the City Hall press conference that she had not yet read about the new national directive. Turner later told the Independent that DOH’s legal department is currently analyzing the directive to assess what kind of impact it will have in Connecticut.

State Judicial Branch spokesperson Rhonda Hebert had a similar response when asked for comment on how this new directive will impact Connecticut courts. ​“We are aware of the CDC directive and assessing its impact now,” she wrote.

Legal Aid: LCI Must Do Better

Yonatan Zamir, a housing attorney with the New Haven Legal Assistance Association (NHLAA), praised the city for the launch of the new local rental assistance program.

“I am enthusiastic that the City is proactively looking to connect tenants and landlords to funding in an effort to stabilize the rental market in the City of New Haven,” he wrote in an email to the Independent Wednesday. ​“So many people — tenants and landlords — are feeling incredibly uncertain and government’s job is to try to reduce that uncertainty.”

Zamir said that his enthusiasm for the program is tempered by his concerns with the agency that will be running it — namely, LCI.

“We do not have a lot of confidence in the leadership of LCI,” he wrote.

Zamir passed along a five page letter that he and attorney Sarah Mervine emailed to LCI’s Neal-Sanjurjo on Aug. 19.

The letter, which can be read in full here, describes a number of concerns with how LCI currently takes in calls from concerned tenants, maintains records, and conducts housing code enforcement inspections.

“In the midst of a public health crisis in which our homes should be the safest place for families to shelter, it is more important than ever that our City’s housing code enforcement system is effectively and expeditiously functioning to assure that tenants are protected from conditions that threaten their health and safety,” Zamir and Mervine wrote.

The lawyers propose a range of potential fixes for LCI’s workflow in that letter. They include:

• Updating LCI’s primary voicemail message to inform callers that they have reached LCI, to let them know what LCI does, to ask them to leave their name, number, home address, and the best time to reach them, and to let callers know that they can expect a follow up call on the next business day, or sooner if the nature of the call is an emergency.

• Keeping an electronic call log of tenant calls, so that tenants can easily reference their call to the city agency if they wish to exercise their legal right to pay rent into court when their apartment is not safe or habitable.

• Creating a searchable online database of landlord registries, oversight programs, and property code violations, as well as an online system to file housing code complaints and a database for all inspections and enforcement. This was one of the recommendations in the mayoral transition team’s report.

• Ensuring that LCI conduct follow-up inspections with landlords before granting them a notification of compliance with the city’s housing code.

“I appreciate their concerns,” Neal-Sanjurjo said in response to legal aid’s letter. She said that, right before the pandemic hit, the city was in the process of moving a number of departments’ data and information systems — including those for LCI — into the online Municity program.

“When we started at the start of the year, things were going fine. We’re not completely live yet because we got caught up in Covid,” she said. ​“The city has a strong plan in how we’re going to improve our data system. We all need to bring our data systems up to the 21st century.”

She said she hopes the Municity public-facing portal will launch soon so that the public can more easily access LCI’s records. ​“This is going to give us an update that’s needed desperately,” she said. ​“We’ve done everything we can to revamp our system internally. We’re very confident about where we are right now.”

Watch the full press conference below.