Nic Ystad was about to start a new job as a welder right before the coronavirus pandemic shut everything down.
Ystad, a single father with two daughters, filed for unemployment benefits and kept applying for jobs.
He gave his landlord several hundred dollars for rent, but couldn't pay the full amount for his Bay View apartment.
Ystad was three months behind on rent when he applied for the Wisconsin Rental Assistance Program (WRAP) through the Social Development Commission in mid-June.
About three weeks after applying, he received the full $3,000 to pay rent for those months' rent, plus July's.
“It saved me, it was so big,” Ystad said. “When the lady told me I got it, I stood up out of my chair. I literally jumped around my living room. Those couple of months of rent being paid has literally saved my girls and I from potentially losing the apartment we’ve been living in for five years.”
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Ystad recently started receiving his unemployment benefits and for the first time in a while felt confident, financially, about the coming months.
“It was getting down to the breaking point,” Ystad said. “If I wouldn’t have been able to pay rent within two weeks, I would’ve gotten an unfortunate eviction notice.”
Ystad's good fortune was short-lived — he recently tested positive for COVID-19. His symptoms are mild, he says, but it has put the job search on hold.
Still, Ystad said he feels “blessed” and knows other Wisconsin residents are going to have difficulty staying in their homes or apartments.
“We’re going to have a very serious issue here if something isn’t done about housing,” Ystad said. “Something has to happen or there’s going to be a lot of people who are going to be forced into homelessness or losing their houses.”
Gov. Tony Evers dedicated $25 million to WRAP for local agencies to help people pay their rent. But it might not be enough to solve the immediate need — let alone long-term housing issues.
As of Friday, approximately $3.5 million in assistance has gone out to just over 2,100 households across the state, according to Brad Paul, executive director of the Wisconsin Community Action Program, which provides guidance to the agencies that received the funds from the state.
He said the housing crisis predates the pandemic, but the shutdown has pushed more Wisconsin renters to the edge of stability.
“It’s urban, rural, suburban, it’s every part of the state,” Paul said. “COVID-19 has opened up the overall fragility of our housing system.”
'I think we'll run out of money'
Some agencies have become overwhelmed by the demand and have hired additional staff to ease the burden.
George Hinton, executive director of the Social Development Commission in Milwaukee, said his agency was shocked by the number of calls it got about the program.
“What we didn’t realize was by the time we started calling people back, we had somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 calls,” Hinton said after the first week of taking applications. “And now we’re up to 17,000.
“I think we’ll run out of money way before we put a dent into that list,” Hinton said.
Applicants can apply for up to $3,000 of assistance to pay past-due rent or make future payments and security deposits and must demonstrate how the pandemic negatively affected them.
Hinton said the Social Development Commission is requiring landlords, as a condition of accepting the funds from the state, to sign an agreement stating they will not evict their tenants.
“The need is so great, the hurt is so bad, even with the money that we have ... we’re going to put a small dent in that number of callers that we have,” Hinton said. “We don’t have enough funding to cover the need. I can tell at this point, one week in, that we don’t have enough funds for the need. And I’m concerned.”
Those struggling to pay rent are likely struggling to fund other needs, Hinton added.
“If they’re having trouble paying for their rent, they’re having trouble paying for everything,” Hinton said.
The Social Development Commission has received $6.4 million from the state to be used to help renters in Milwaukee County and $400,000 to be used for renters in Washington and Ozaukee counties.
Milwaukee and Dane counties have each put in $10 million toward their local agencies to help with the housing issue.
As of early July, the SDC officials say they have helped more than 150 people and distributed more than $260,000.
Still, June evictions in Milwaukee County were up 26% over the last year as Evers' moratorium order on evictions expired on May 26. In the first two weeks after the expiration of the order, evictions across the state jumped up by 40%.
Borrowing money from savings, parents
The rental crisis is not limited to metro areas. The Southwestern Wisconsin Community Action Program (SWCAP) has also seen a great demand for rental assistance in a more rural part of the state.
The agency received a total of $585,000 to be distributed to residents in Grant, Green Lafayette, Iowa and Richland counties.
So far SWCAP has helped 84 households, including 209 individuals, with $127,228 in rental assistance.
Michelle Friedrich, family service coordinator for SWCAP, said there's "a huge need" —they have already received more than 530 prescreened applications for rent assistance.
Some aren't yet behind on their rent but will be soon because they've been paying rent "using their taxes, their stimulus check, their savings accounts," she said. "Some people have been borrowing money from their parents to try to pay their rent.”
Others have already received eviction notices. They will be helped first, Friedrich said, "to prevent them from being homeless."
The money SWCAP received is significantly less than what SDC got, but the cost of rent is typically lower on the western side of the state compared to the eastern side, so the maximum $3,000 per household can theoretically last longer.
But there is still a lack of affordable housing in southwestern Wisconsin.
Subsidized units get "scarfed up right away" when they become available, Friedrich said.
“Some of the landlords have waiting lists with 20 to 25 people on them wanting to get into their housing.”
Those who don't live in cities also spend more traveling to work or to the grocery store — which can eat into a person's monthly budget.
Tax refunds and stimulus checks may have helped families scrape by at the beginning of the pandemic, Friedrich said. But some still haven't received those checks, and many are still waiting on unemployment benefits. The state has a backlog of thousands of unpaid unemployment claims.
And the additional $600 per week in joblessness benefits provided through a federal aid package runs out July 25.
'Really close to becoming homeless'
The Lakeshore Community Action Program received nearly $630,000 to assist renters in Manitowoc, Sheboygan and Door counties.
Normally the program would help between 1,000 and 1,200 people with rent assistance during a full year.
In just the last month, more than 550 people applied for assistance to the WRAP program, CAP officials say.
Colleen Homb, executive director of Lakeshore CAP, said the need is likely to last past the Oct. 31 deadline to apply for funding.
“There are going to be households that are probably not going to have their rental assistance needs met because we have run out of money,” Homb said.
Kate Markwardt, supportive housing program director for Lakeshore CAP, said not having access to reliable internet can be a barrier for some applicants, especially given the volume of documents needed.
“Oftentimes they only have internet on their telephone,” Markwardt said. “That makes it a little more challenging to get the documentation that we need.”
Markwardt said she's spoken with many families who have never been in a situation like this before and don't know how to navigate the process or feel embarrassed to come forward.
And many families have received eviction notices, are thousands of dollars behind in rent and are "really close to becoming homeless," she said.
For Paul, with the Wisconsin Community Action Program, stabilizing people and keeping them in their housing is the "right approach."
But long-term action from the state or federal government is needed, he said, to solve wider housing issues, as well as access to jobs, child care and transportation.
“I’m not sure correcting 20, 30 years of federal housing policy can be done during the middle of a pandemic.”
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Many families in Wisconsin are 'close to becoming homeless' as effects of pandemic continue and help dries up - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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