Congress allocated tens of billions of dollars to help Americans get thru the pandemic cut in work and earnings…..
Tens’s of billions has not been made available to renters by their state and local officials….
The Supreme’s just made President Biden correct in saying he can’t have the CDC be involved in evictions….
Now what as landlords will begin their efforts to get paid rent or move people out….
The problem is that Federal money comes with a LOT of paperwork that is often difficult to deal with….
Add poor people and others , who just pay their rent and don’t compile records of everything ?….
And you have problems…
Headlines about fraud put officials on the defensive about programs….
In Georgia, the website to apply for the state’s aid program asks tenants to provide income documents for every adult in a household, a past-due rent notice or utility bill as well as documents showing a loss of income or an attestation that they’re eligible for unemployment benefits.
The state also asks for a paper trail of rental payments, which is problematic for low-income tenants who pay in cash, said Bambie Hayes-Brown, president and CEO of Georgia Advancing Communities Together Inc. She also said renters frequently don’t have copies of their current leases.
“I think it comes from a blanket distrust of poor people, to be brutally honest,” said Hayes-Brown.
Housing groups say officials have brushed off their calls to re-focus on the needs of the hardest–hit Americans and to streamline the application process for tapping into $46.5 billion in rental assistance approved by Congress since December. With many officials concerned about fraud and struggling to get the word out about the aid, the vast majority of the money has yet to reach tenants and their landlords — only 10 percent of the funds had been distributed as of the end of July.
“Nobody is this incompetent. Nobody,” said Andreanecia Morris, executive director of the affordable housing group HousingNOLA in Louisiana. “At the end of the day, this is systemic bias — this is anti-Black racism, anti-renter bias, anti-poor people bias. … There isn’t any other explanation for this level of ineptitude.”
The fight over renter protections is now largely a state and local problem after Thursday’s Supreme Court decision to halt the federal eviction ban. It’s unlikely that Democrats in Congress will be able to muster the votes to craft their own eviction moratorium, and the Biden administration is turning its attention to putting pressure on governors and mayors to shield renters and landlords. State and local agencies that have been slow in distributing the money now face the prospect of the federal government clawing back unused funds at the end of September, potentially exacerbating the situation.
In response to the growing backlash, local officials have put some of the blame on the federal government for not making it clearer that they could relax application requirements. They say it’s been a huge struggle to set up aid distribution programs from scratch. They dismiss allegations that the bottlenecks are a result of anti-poor bias.
“The state housing agencies exist to provide housing stability to low-income people,” said Stockton Williams, executive director of the National Council of State Housing Agencies. “To the extent that some programs had rules in place that’s made it a challenge, it’s because program administrators wanted to make sure they followed the rules.”…
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In Georgia, the website to apply for the state’s aid program asks tenants to provide income documents for every adult in a household, a past-due rent notice or utility bill as well as documents showing a loss of income or an attestation that they’re eligible for unemployment benefits.
The state also asks for a paper trail of rental payments, which is problematic for low-income tenants who pay in cash, said Bambie Hayes-Brown, president and CEO of Georgia Advancing Communities Together Inc. She also said renters frequently don’t have copies of their current leases.
“I think it comes from a blanket distrust of poor people, to be brutally honest,” said Hayes-Brown.
Actually, I don’t find what’s happening here that surprising.
Throwing billions of dollars out there to be disbursed in a relatively short period of time is a recipe for fraud and the bureaucratic inertia that we are seeing.
Certainly well intentioned but the result is what it is.
No one is to blame?Everyone is to blame?
Pick your poison.