Anxious tenants awaiting assistance

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Six months after Congress approved spending tens of billions of dollars to bail out renters facing eviction, South Carolina was just reaching its first tenants. All nine of them.

Like most states, it had plenty of money to distribute — $272 million. But it had handed out just over $36,000 by June. The pace has since intensified, but South Carolina still has only distributed $15.5 million in rent and utility payments as of Aug. 20, or about 6 percent of its funds.

“People are strangling on the red tape,” said Sandy Gillis, executive director of the Hilton Head Deep Well Project, which stopped referring tenants to the program and started paying overdue rent through its own private funds instead.

The struggles in South Carolina are emblematic of a program launched at the beginning of the year with the promise of solving the pandemic eviction crisis, only to fall victim in many states to bureaucratic hurdles, political inertia and unclear guidance at the federal level.

The concerns about the slow pace intensified Thursday, after the Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a temporary ban that was put in place because of the coronavirus pandemic. Some 3.5 million people in the U.S. as of Aug. 16 said they face eviction in the next two months, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.

The Treasury Department said this week that just over $5.1 billion of the estimated $46.5 billion in federal rental assistance — only 11 percent — has been distributed by states and localities through July. This includes some $3 billion handed out by the end of June and another $1.5 billion by May 31.

Nearly a million households have been served and 70 places have gotten at least half their money out, including Texas, according to Treasury.

But there are 16 states, according to the latest data, that had distributed less than 5 percent and nine that spent less than 3 percent.