A city councilor is calling for the city to shift Community Preservation Act money over to direct rent assistance as the coronavirus pandemic deepens and the council mulls a resolution over temporarily ending rent collection.
City Council housing committee chairwoman Lydia Edwards plans to introduce an order next week for hearings into whether the city can reapportion some of the $24 million it has taken in this year through the CPA tax over to rent assistance.
“We should take some of that money right now and directly pay some people’s rent,” Edwards told the Herald on Monday, saying millions has been set aside to help start housing projects that now are indefinitely on hold due to the virus. “This is tax money we’ve already collected.”
This comes as City Councilor Ricardo Arroyo said Monday that the plan is to seek a vote on his nonbinding resolution calling on the city, state and federal governments to to “use the powers vested within them to issue an immediate moratorium on rent, mortgage payments, evictions and foreclosures” during the current coronavirus crisis — a proposal that’s drawn some pushback.
“It’s a push to get folks to treat this like the emergency that it is,” Arroyo said. “We have a situation here that the government has to step in.”
He noted that the measure is just an expression of the will of the council, saying of an actual moratorium, “We can’t enact it. I know that. That’s why it’s a resolution calling on those who can.”
Nearly all of the other councilors signed onto Arroyo’s resolution it last week, which normally means that a resolution would be voted on and pass the day it’s introduced. But any objection means it can’t be voted on immediately, and City Councilor Frank Baker registered one.
Baker said in a statement Monday, “I, like all Bostonians, want crucial protections for our hard-working residents paying rent as well as those paying mortgages. But this proposal is not only reckless and misguided, it actually oversteps our authority and will only cause confusion and do more harm than good.”
Massachusetts Mortgage Bankers Association head Deborah Souza said in a letter to the council, “Individual cities and towns should not create their own moratoriums – this would be impossible for lenders and servicers to track and process.”
She added, “There are going to be consumers that will make unwise financial decisions thinking that the government has somehow cancelled their obligations to pay rent or mortgage payments.”
The state’s housing courts are currently shut down, so no evictions currently can go through — though landlords can file for them.
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March 31, 2020 at 07:27AM
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Boston coronavirus rent assistance proposed - Boston Herald
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