Will rental assistance be enough ?
Missing from the relief fund is a way to help many with shadow debt
More than a year after the pandemic idled millions of workers and slashed household incomes, help at long last is coming to lowincome Californians facing a mountain of back rent.
The solution until now has been to freeze evictions. That kept millions of stressed renters in their homes, but it didn’t free them from paying all that rent down the road.
Now some may be getting their rent debt wiped off the books.
California is getting $2.6 billion from the December stimulus package to help tenants with pandemic hardships pay off unpaid rent from April 1, 2020, through March 31 — provided their landlords agree to accept 80% of the amount owed and forgive the rest. Assistance also is available for unpaid utilities.
If the landlords don’t agree, renters still can get assistance covering 25% of their rent from last April through next June, guaranteeing they can’t be evicted for any missed rent during that period.
Assistance is available to tenants earning less than 80% of their area’s median income — and only to those earning less than 50% of the median income in the city of Los Angeles to ensure there’s enough aid to help those most at risk of losing their homes. The money is paid directly to landlords.
California expects to get an additional $2.2 billion from the American Rescue Plan signed March 11 by President Joe Biden.
The state housing department began accepting applications for rental assistance March 15, and local cities and counties administering their own programs also are beginning to receive applications.
We spoke with Geoffrey Ross, a deputy director at the California Department of Housing and Community Development, about its efforts to keep low-income renters in their homes. His comments have been edited for space.
QAs many as 15% of California tenants have accumulated rent debt. Estimates of the amount owed range from $400 million to $4 billion. Will this program be enough to wipe out that debt?
AWe hope this is more money than we need, but we worry that this won’t be enough.
There are a lot of estimates, a lot of well-informed guesses. But we just don’t know how big that need is. And quite honestly, even the funds that we have in this moment can only get to very specific pieces of that need.
There has been shadow debt. Folks have taken personal loans, loans from family members,
they’ve charged their credit cards in different ways. It’s created additional debt that either tenants or landlords have accrued that are not yet being addressed.
QAny idea how many households will be assisted with this program?
AAt this point, I don’t know. We anticipated potentially 1 million folks applying. So this is going to be the proof of concept where we’ll get a sense of how many folks are coming through the program and really what that need is.
Q