New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Federal official praises state’s relief for tenants, landlords
MIDDLETOWN — Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo on Thursday praised Gov. Ned Lamont for overcoming obstacles in the initial development of pandemic landlord and tenant assistance program, which has now become a national model.
While it took months for Connecticut to roll out the federal support program, as of September 1, 9,388 tenants and 3,742 landlords have received grants including nearly $73 million in rental assistance, with another $38.9 million pending.
The key, Adeyemo said during a round table discussion in the senior citizens center here, was President Joe Biden’s goal to make it easy to free up the money and get it to owners and tenants alike. “When the president came into office he asked us to simplify the program as much as possible,” Adeyemo said. “What we’ve been doing since then is working in partnership with the states to make sure they take advantage of the flexibility we have built into our guidance.”
Extra documentation and other requirements when the program started last year, he said, slowed down the relief programs throughout the country, and have now been dropped.
“I’ll walk away from today realizing that here in Connecticut you have found a way to use the flexibility provided by the federal government in a way that assures people get the resources they need,” Adeyemo said. “There is clearly more we need to do. I will be referring people to the state of Connecticut when they ask me how can we do this, when I’m talking to other governors, when I’m talking to other mayors, when I’m talking to housing commissioners.”
Adeyemo joined Lamont, U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, state Housing Commissioner Seila Mosquera-Bruno and other officials in a tour of a recreational vehicle retrofitted to become a mobile registration vehicle for the UniteCT, program, which depends on tenants and landlords to work together. The average assistance is about $7,500. Another 1,500 people have obtained help in paying their overdue utility bills, Mosquera-Bruno said.
Hayes said that Connecticut’s success in helping navigate the pandemic, in stabilizing both families and communities, seems to be above and beyond what Congress had contemplated with the original assistance plans. “I think that’s our next phase of work: creating a path to home ownership,” Hayes added. “Right now, so much of our attention and energy is focused on what is happening right now, but we also have to be mindful of how do we prevent these types of situations from happening in the future. How do we reach out into communities before they get into an eviction, or the problem of being housing insecure.”
Hayes called the assistance program unprecedented in American history, and the project itself has expanded from rental relief to helping landlords as well. “This has been an evolving situation,” she said. “It wasn’t like we legislated it, allocated funds and walked away from it. From the beginning to now, every time we heard about a potential barrier or problem or something that people were facing, we went back and said we need to tweak this or we need to change this part of these programs or this part of the law, based on what we were hearing.”
She said as recently as July, when the eviction ban was set to expire, Congress came back and made adjustments.
“I salute what Congress and the feds and we tried to do, which is make this money into a partnership between tenants and landlords,” Lamont said. “That took a little more work and it was a little over-burdensome at the beginning, but we wanted to have a sustainable solution to allow our landlords to stand on their feet and allow a lot of tenants to get back on their feet.”