Got a bad ERAP

For tens of thousands of New Yorkers, the pandemic-driven, federally funded Emergency Rental Assistance Program was the only thing that kept them on top of rent and in their homes. Left out were NYCHA residents, and now the money’s gone, with the Kevin McCarthy-led House disinclined to break out the checkbook anew.

That puts the onus on Albany to find a solution, particularly given that this is a mess of its own creation. No other state categorically kept public housing authorities away from the federal money spigot made available specifically to help tenants pay their rent.

Indeed, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development confirmed in a letter to NYCHA that New York’s public housing authorities saw the ratio of unpaid rent to total tenant revenue balloon wildly disproportionate to housing authorities elsewhere. New York is inarguably in a unique position, with NYCHA alone operating as many apartments as several of the next largest authorities put together; officials reasoned that the limited ERAP money should go to nongovernment landlords as opposed to a public entity that at the very least would not collapse or turn off the heat and water.

That’s a solid enough rationale, but it doesn’t change the fact that NYCHA still does need the operating revenue from rents, and it was shut out of the program designed to provide that revenue. Lawmakers who regularly decry the condition of NYCHA developments should have to answer the question of where, exactly, the money is going to come from, and it certainly isn’t going to come from cash-strapped tenants for whom a few thousand dollars in arrears may as well be a million.

Initiatives like the under-construction Housing Preservation Trust will bring in much-needed funding, but that’ll mainly be for capital improvements and large-scale repairs. NYCHA itself can certainly find efficiencies in operations, and should use enforcement mechanisms to collect rent from those who really can pay or who owed rent from well before the pandemic, but that’s not going to fill the hole here. Albany, we’re all ears.