CDC eviction moratorium is extended, but renters have a bigger need, advocates say
With the Biden administration extending the federal eviction moratorium until the end of June, tenants in North Carolina have protection from eviction a few months longer, but housing advocates say the bigger need is getting rental assistance out as quickly as possible.
Jesse McCoy, supervising attorney at the Duke Civil Justice Clinic, said in an interview with The News & Observer that the extension only delays rent deadlines and is not a final solution to the issue at hand.
“Simply extending moratoria without dealing with the financial aspect that supports keeping people housed ends up just kicking the can down further into the year,” McCoy said.
As of September, the most recent data available, at least 300,000 households in North Carolina were behind on rent, according to a report from the National Council of State Housing Agencies.
Samuel Gunter, executive director of the N.C. Housing Coalition, said in an interview that the moratorium is good for public health and allows tenants to stay quarantined.
But he said the moratorium by itself is not enough.
“You keep people in their homes, but then all the folks who own the housing that people are renting, they’re still needing to make their mortgage payments,” Gunter said. “Rental assistance is the other pillar of that.”
Landlords “on their last leg”
Dustin Engelken, government affairs director at the Triangle Apartment Association, said in an interview that the COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected landlords as they have lost monthly income from rent.
He said eviction is the only recourse when a tenant can’t make rent and landlords shouldn’t have to take the financial responsibility for inefficient rental aid.
“Many of our members are really on their last leg. Many people haven’t been paid in a year,” Engelken said. “Inefficient administration and poor planning shouldn’t result in more bad policy.”
Engelken said that without evictions, landlords aren’t able to find a new tenant who is able to pay the rent.
“Even in good times, evictions are a last resort. Nobody makes money on evictions. Nobody is an advocate for evictions, per se, but unfortunately, evictions are really the only remedy you have for a tenant who’s not fulfilling their contractual terms on the lease,” Engelken said.
He said the better solution for both tenant and landlord is to streamline the rental aid process and to get funds out as quickly as possible.
“There are a lot of people in need, and there are a lot of people who have been in need for over a year now,” Engelken said. “Making this process longer hurts everyone.”
Rental assistance at both the state and federal level has been allocated, but due to legislative and administrative holdups, much of that aid hasn’t gotten into the hands of tenants and landlords.
Slow rollout of rental assistance
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first instituted the eviction moratorium back in September as a way to curb COVID-19 transmission by allowing tenants to stay quarantined in their homes.
While the order does protect from evictions due to nonpayment of rent as a result of income loss due to the pandemic, it does not forgive rent, and it does not have a mechanism for rental assistance.
In August, Gov. Roy Cooper allocated $175 million in federal funding for rent and utility assistance statewide.
With that funding, the Housing Opportunities and Prevention of Evictions program, or HOPE, was created to allocate aid to tenants behind on rent.
But the demand for assistance was high, and the program ran out of money. It stopped accepting applications in November, less than a month after it started.
In late December, Congress passed federal COVID-19 stimulus that included $546.5 million in rental aid for North Carolina.
That funding was set to be allocated to the HOPE program.
But General Assembly bill H196, which was signed into law earlier in March, imposed a maximum amount of money each county could receive.
Republican Sen. Ralph Hise, who wrote the provision, said this was to deliver funds to “where the need is across the state,” The N&O reported.
But Laura Hogshead, chief operating officer of the state Office of Recovery and Resiliency, which operates the HOPE program, said in an interview that the county caps force administrative restraints that will significantly slow down aid disbursement.
She said it essentially forces the HOPE program to operate 100 different rental aid programs — one for each county — instead of one streamlined program for the entire state.
Instead of rental aid going to where the demand is, Hogshead said, each of these 100 programs would receive funds at a slower pace to make sure they’re not exceeding their cap requirements.
“We’re looking to achieve the goal of rural representation,” Hogshead said, “while not having 100 different programs, but one program split into 100 different counties.”
Hogshead said the agency is in talks with the state legislature to change the language of the bill to get aid out as quickly as possible.
She said that she expects the HOPE program to begin accepting applications again in the next few weeks.
Since the HOPE program stopped accepting applications in November, nearly 37,000 households have been accepted that were able to apply beforehand and $140 million has been disbursed to tenants and landlords.
This story was originally published April 2, 2021 at 11:43 AM with the headline "CDC eviction moratorium is extended, but renters have a bigger need, advocates say."