The Rent Is Too Damn High, Con't

One thing that America has completely and utterly failed at is the program designed to get rental assistance to millions of Americans facing eviction, and the NY Times has discovered that after seven months, the program has only doled out about 10% of the funds it has gotten because the process is so ridiculously difficult that nobody can handle it.

 

The $46.5 billion rental aid program created to pay rent accrued during the pandemic continues to disburse money at a slow pace, as the White House braces for a Supreme Court order that could strike down a new national moratorium on evictions.

The Emergency Rental Assistance Program, funded in the two federal pandemic relief packages passed over the last year, sputtered along in July, with just $1.7 billion being distributed by state and local governments, according to the Treasury Department, which oversees the program.

The money meted out was a modest increase from the prior month, bringing the total aid disbursed thus far to about $5.1 billion, figures released early Wednesday showed, or roughly 11 percent of the cash allocated by Congress to avoid an eviction crisis that many housing experts now see as increasingly likely.

“About a million payments have now gone out to families — it is starting to help a meaningful number of families,” said Gene Sperling, who oversees the operation of federal pandemic relief programs for President Biden.

“It’s just not close to enough in an emergency like this to protect all the families who need and deserve to be protected. So there is still way more to do and to do fast,” he added.

The report came as Mr. Biden’s domestic policy staff mapped out policy contingencies if the Supreme Court strikes down the moratorium, which is the administration’s principal safeguard for hundreds of thousands of low income and working class tenants hit hardest by the pandemic. White House lawyers expect a court decision this week.

The moratorium was initially implemented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last September under President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Biden extended it several times this year, but allowed it to briefly expire earlier this month. He reinstated it, in a slightly modified form, on Aug. 3 under pressure from congressional Democrats.

That final 60-day extension, enacted over the objection of White House lawyers, was intended to buy more time to distribute the emergency rental assistance.

The program is administered by the federal government, but it is up to states to build out a system to deliver aid to struggling renters and landlords, and that has been the main source of its problems.

 

Here's the problem: states don't want to do this. They want to evict people. The corporate lobbyists for the massive property rental and Wall Street real estate investors want people evicted so they can snap up the rentals and make billions. 

There's been minimum progress, but it's not going to save millions of people from getting evicted in the next few months once the Supreme Court kills the eviction moratorium. Here in KY and Ohio, where the moratorium is already dead thanks to the 6th Circuit court, thousands have already been evicted and thousands more will be soon, right into the heart of the COVID delta spike.

This is a disaster, all the way around, on states, on Trump, on Congress, and on Biden.