The Deeper Dig is a biweekly podcast from the VTDigger newsroom, hosted and produced by Sam Gale Rosen. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
The expiration of a federal eviction moratorium has sparked warnings of a national eviction crisis. But tenants’ advocates in Vermont are hopeful that the state’s new rental relief program will keep people in their homes for now.
Announced earlier this month, the state’s $25 million rental assistance program allows tenants and landlords to apply for grants to cover unpaid rent. (A similar program for homeowners offers about $5 million in mortgage relief.)
An estimated 1,400 households applied for rental assistance in the first two weeks of the program, according to Richard Williams, executive director of the Vermont State Housing Authority. Advocates expect applications to ramp up as the $600-per-week federal unemployment supplement expires.
“The first day of the program was way beyond what we thought it would be,” said Jean Murray, an attorney for Vermont Legal Aid.
The state’s eviction moratorium remains in effect until 30 days after the coronavirus state of emergency expires. Without state aid, advocates say, the courts would face a backlog of eviction cases as soon as the moratorium lifts — potentially making hundreds of families homeless at once.
Because the new funding can be used to pay back rent from prior to the pandemic, and because it can be used to assist renters in moving into more affordable living situations, advocates are hopeful that the program will help stabilize the rental market through the end of the year. But, they warn, it won’t mitigate the affordable housing crisis Vermont faced even before the pandemic.
“Our concern is that it’s a limited pool of funds,” said Jessica Hyman, director of the Fair Housing Project at the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity. “It’s going to run out. And so that could lead to more people facing more housing instability and more evictions down the road, when the eviction moratorium expires.”
**Podcast transcript**
This week: While national housing groups warn of a looming eviction crisis, Vermont has rolled out a rental relief program to help keep people housed during the pandemic. Tenants’ advocates say that effort will help in the short term — but they also warn that the factors making housing unaffordable to many Vermonters aren’t going away.
The first wave of tenants who applied for rental assistance are just now being notified of whether they’ll get help. One of those applicants is Ericca, who rents an apartment in Manchester. She asked that we only use her first name.
Before Covid, Ericca was working two jobs: one as an office manager, and one as a server in a restaurant. By May 1st, she had lost both.
Ericca: So very quickly, I went from a pretty comfortable living situation, to, you know, pretty scared.
What happened then?
Ericca: [Laughs] A nervous breakdown.
I’m a single mom, and I’m somewhat new to Manchester — I moved to Manchester two years ago, specifically moved to Manchester, because my daughter wanted to attend the high school here in town, Burr and Burton Academy. Manchester is a very expensive town to live in, so immediately I did, I had a panic attack, because I was thinking, “I’m not going to be able to afford to stay in Manchester. I’m going to have to move my child again. She’s not going to be able to continue at this school where she is just excelling.”So it was really devastating for me. I’ve done everything I could to stay afloat, but my rent is on the pricier side. So unfortunately, without the income that I had before this apartment, it’s not sustainable anymore.
As soon as Ericca found out there was a relief program in the works, she got on a mailing list, got notified when applications opened, and submitted her paperwork on day one. She’s optimistic that it’ll help her settle up with her landlord — and that it’ll help her get into a more sustainable situation long-term.
Ericca: The nice part about this program is, of course, they’re going to help me pay the balance that I currently owe. But they’re also going to assist me in getting into an affordable apartment. I’ve already begun my search. I’ve put out applications for subsidized housing — and I’m going to be honest, it was really painful for me to have to apply for subsidized housing. I’m a very proud person. I’m a very hard worker. So to apply for subsidized housing was really upsetting for me, but I have a kid so I did it.
So without this help, what would happen? I would be evicted from this apartment, and I would probably end up homeless. I don’t have any family at all in the area, and the family that I do have, they live far away but they also are not you know, they’re not financially wealthy either, so they really can’t help me. So without this program I, you know, likely would very much end up homeless with my kid.
I’m 43 years old. This is the first time in my adult life I’ve collected unemployment. This is the first time in my life I’ve been unemployed. So it’s just — it’s been really hard. So to know that there’s programs out there to help us not end up homeless, it’s great that that’s out there for us.
Ericca’s is one of an estimated 1400 households that have applied for rental assistance in the first two weeks of the program. That’s according to Richard Williams, from the Vermont State Housing Authority. He’s said previously that about 8500 low-income renting households could qualify for grants.
Richard Williams (at a July 10 press conference): The primary goal of this program during his public health emergency is to keep Vermonters housed, allow Vermonters to keep their rented homes and avoid homelessness, and avert termination of tenancy and court evictions by granting back rent funds…
Williams announced the program on July 10, and applications opened on the 13th. And with the $600 federal unemployment supplement expiring this week, advocates are expecting applications to ramp up from here.
Jean Murray: There are 76,000 rental households in Vermont. Of the 76,000 rental households in Vermont, 18,000 are paying 50% or more of their income for rent.
This is Jean Murray, from Vermont Legal Aid.
Jean Murray: So that really means if you’re paying half of your household income for rent, it means that your budget is very tight. If something goes wrong with the car, if you need to be sick from work for a couple of weeks, and your employer doesn’t offer sick pay, then that household is very quickly behind in rent and at risk for eviction.
So that is the regular conditions. And then the pandemic and the shutdown came along.
Jean was part of a group of advocates that pushed the state to issue an eviction moratorium — which effectively meant no one could get kicked out of a rental unit during the height of the pandemic. But tenants still owed rent to their landlords — and if they were already behind on payments, they would stay that way. Which led advocates to worry that as soon as this moratorium expired, the courts would proceed with a massive backlog of eviction cases.
Jean Murray: In an average year, for the last few years, and it varies, there are 1800 eviction cases filed a year. 75% of those are for nonpayment. People have not been filing as many evictions as they would have filed, which would have been about 150 a month. So once the state of emergency is over, courts will be able to start hearing eviction cases 30 days after that.
So once the state of emergency is over, one would imagine that landlords who haven’t been paid rent, and they may not have been paid rent for months, would want to file an eviction so that they can at least get their apartment back and rent it to somebody who will pay rent.
I think without the back rent program, once the state of emergency is over, we would see perhaps several months of backed up — like in an average year, 150 eviction cases a month. So then it would seem we’d see at least that many, times four or five months, or whatever it’s going to be.
So Murray and other advocates pitched the Legislature on a program that would use federal CARES Act money to cover the rent for tenants who can’t pay. Meaning that even if the moratorium ends in the next few months, there’s grant money available to people on the verge of eviction. The program will pay landlords directly for the amount their tenants owe.
Jean Murray: Obviously, landlords who aren’t getting paid still have the expense of being landlords. And so it can’t just be the state says, “okay, nobody can evict anybody and there’s going to be no economic consequences of that.” There is going to be an economic consequence.
The state looked at studies from the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston that estimated how many people wouldn’t be able to pay their rent in New England once the extra unemployment money ran out, and the stimulus payments were spent, and came up with a quite a big number. 23,000 was what the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston estimated. And why is the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston estimating that? Because if people aren’t paying their rent, mortgage and taxes don’t get paid, and all of the money that banks have invested in property is not getting paid. So it all comes together.
So the idea was to take some of the federal Coronavirus Relief Fund and make sure that tenants’ rents get paid to the landlords, so that they can make their payments, and at least that part of the economy is somewhat supported.
The state put $25 million towards this stabilization program with the goal of keeping funds available through the end of the year. There’s also a similar program for homeowners offering about $5 million in mortgage relief. Now that the programs have launched, advocates like Jean are waiting to see how long this funding lasts.
Jean Murray: There’s quite a bit of money in the pot. But I think people are really worried that the money is going to run out. And so the first day of the program was way beyond what we thought it would be. Hundreds of applications the first day. We don’t know exactly what the exact demand on the program is then, but it was a big rush. It’s been a big rush this week.
When you talk about the overall size of this fund, and how much is there versus how much might be needed, do you have a sense of: is this enough to really stabilize this market from now through the end of the year? Or is it possible that we could run through this fund and some renters might be left in the lurch?
Jean Murray: I have a sense that it’s enough for now. There was a plan that the Legislature was going to add more into the program when they come back. So I have both things: I have a sense that there’s enough to last to the end of the year, and that it may not last that long. So we’ll have to see.
I heard the same concerns from a group of program directors at the Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity. This is Jess Hyman, the director of CVOEO’s Fair Housing program:
Jess Hyman: The rental stabilization program is really important in that it’s covering past rent, not just during the Covid time, but before that, too. They’ve designed it so that it’s stabilizing housing and not just repaying back rent from Covid time. So that’s one thing that’s very good about it.
The other thing is that when a landlord receives the funding, there are some stipulations about when they can and can’t raise rent or any rent to eviction proceedings for their tenants. So there are these additional protections that come for the tenants as a result of receiving some of this funding.
Our concern is that it’s a limited pool of funds. And people have to know about it and get access to it. And it’s going to run out. So that could lead to more people facing more housing instability and more evictions down the road when the eviction moratorium expires.
Jess and her colleagues said Vermont was facing a shortage of affordable rental housing long before the pandemic. And it’s not like this program stands to stabilize that market in the long term.
Sandrine Kibuey: This rental assistance stabilization is very good. I mean, it tackled, like Jess said, a portion of some financial issues related to rent that people had prior to Covid. But still, because of the pandemic raging still, the lack of affordable housing, the rate of unemployment…Without continued support, we still see people who are facing eviction, people becoming homeless, because the stabilization is just temporal.
This is Sandrine Kibuey. She’s the director of the Vermont Tenants and Mobile Homes programs.
Sandrine Kibuey: Basically, without continuous financial support, and making it a system-level action, then I do believe we will revert to the same exact situation in a few months. Especially that Covid is not going anywhere.
You’re saying that there’s a risk of just delaying the inevitable here: That this could push things off by a few months, but then at that point, we may still see a large number of evictions that would have happened over the course of this summer, that are now just kind of being delayed if there’s no further action taken.
Sandrine Kibuey: Well, I would say for people that do participate in that program, they have a provision that says that they can evict anybody for six months for the acceptance of the relief. And then there is no there is no limit on how many times you can apply for these funds, which is good. But still it ends December 30 if you apply twice, for example, and then it gives you probably like a year. But after a year, if COVID is still what it is — and if we don’t have everything in place to cover the inevitable, which is people needing that stabilization, not only financially but systematically — then we will see, again, people facing the same issue.
I mean, the poor is not getting richer by getting through that system. The poor is getting poorer. So, until we look at the minimum wage and all these issues that have to do with social injustice and inequity, then we’ll revert to that.
That sounds like a challenge given people talking about the potential length of this economic downturn. It seems like a long road ahead.
Sandrine Kibuey: It depends on the impact that program will have. Really the assessment on the Covid-19 impact on the economy, all of that will definitely determine how we’ll proceed when it comes to advocacy. But before Covid, we were pushing for equity, we were pushing for justice. So this will not change. This will not change. I think that Covid has showed us, definitely, the gaps, the huge gaps that we had in our systems. It’s not only social, it’s racial, it’s the economy. It’s the whole structure that we are basing our programs and our services, really, that Covid really showed us where we were at and where we need — not necessarily how we need to proceed, but at least what the issues that we have to tackle and how deep the issues are. So that’s a good thing.
Jean Murray: The pandemic has exposed a number of things. I mean, if you ask anybody in any topic area, they will say yeah, the pandemic makes this thing that was already bad somewhat worse.
Jean Murray, from Vermont Legal Aid, said she’s also hopeful about finding long-term solutions — partly just because right now, people are actually paying attention to the housing crisis.
Jean Murray: People are realizing that if we had the will to direct the money that we have that way, the problem could be solved. In other words, having a whole lot of people focus on the consequences of: Unaffordable housing leads to homelessness. Homelessness is expensive for the state of Vermont. It is far more expensive for the state of Vermont to provide funding to put a person in a motel even on a temporary basis. All of those kinds of things, all those temporary fixes to provide shelter to homeless people, are very expensive. It would be much less expensive to have people housed in permanent housing. This circumstance made that very, very clear.I think that idea being more prominent in more people’s minds…yes, maybe we’re on our way to a solution for that. In the meantime, my understanding is that the state budget is, by itself, not going to do so well this year. But having people understand that we could solve the unaffordable housing, homelessness problem, I think, will stick with us for a while.
Thanks for your time. I really appreciate you taking the time to get on and chat about this.
Jean Murray: Okay, thanks for your attention. Take care.
