Shield tenants until help arrives

At noon today, when the Legislature convenes in extraordinary session at the call of Gov. Hochul, residential evictions in New York, frozen since COVID began in March 2020 by either federal or state rule, will have been permitted for 12 hours, since the last tenant protections expired at midnight. They cut it far too close and must hurry to act.

To keep people in their homes until the billions rental aid funds from Washington have been distributed to hurting landlords, lawmakers must vote in a renewed eviction moratorium and backdate it to cover anything filed today. Hochul must then sign it immediately. Hochul’s first law should be carefully and narrowly drawn, as the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly instructed the nation. Too many other slipshod moratorium efforts, by Washington and Albany, have been shot down by the court.

A new date of Jan. 15, four-and-a-half months away, seems plenty of time to get every eligible tenant to apply to the state’s Emergency Rental

Assistance Program, which is sitting on the money sent by Congress to reimburse property owners for missing monthly payments. Once an application has been started, as Hochul has helpfully pointed out, that tenant has a year’s protection from eviction while the money for the landlord (averaging $13,000) is processed and sent out.

If the $2.7 billion in aid gets to where it is meant to go, the threat of eviction for non-payment will dissipate and end the crisis. Doing so will require Hochul and her administration to efficiently match tenants and landlords with the cash. It’s a major test for the new governor.

Today’s in-person session of the Assembly and Senate (remote procedures set up earlier in the pandemic lapsed) will show up Congress, as those federal lawmakers have left the nation’s renters at risk. In many places outside of New York, there is now no federal freeze and no state freeze and tenants will be left out in the cold and out on the street despite the money being there. Shameful.