“As these funds run out, Treasury is encouraging state and local governments to invest in long-term strategies to prevent evictions and build affordable housing, using other resources,” he added.
The program, initiated under the Trump administration and ramped up by Mr. Biden’s team, got off to a sluggish start, as state governments struggled to create new systems to process applications, determine eligibility and distribute the cash.
But by late 2021, most local systems were up and running, thanks in part to White House guidelines relaxing verification requirements.
The enormous infusion of cash, coupled with federal and local eviction bans, helped prevent or delay about 1.35 million evictions in 2021, according to an analysis published last week by Princeton’s Eviction Lab. Evictions have risen in recent months in some cities but remain below the levels predicted when the pandemic first struck.
Most of the aid that the Treasury Department is clawing back comes from states in the West, Midwest and New England with relatively high per capita incomes and low percentages of renters per capita. But part of the money is being pulled out of some of the country’s poorest states, where local officials were unable, for various political and logistical reasons, to disburse the funds.
Alabama, for instance, is losing $42 million from a total allocation of about $263 million. A spokesman for the state’s housing agency provided a memo from state housing officials claiming that the Treasury Department “did not consider that Alabama has a lower proportion of renters to homeowners” in making its aid decisions, and that an overall lack of need put “downward pressure” on applications.
But applicants and housing groups have complained that the state has made accessing the money difficult, and that a company hired to run the program rejected a large percentage of low-income tenants.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/pandemic-housing-aid.html
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