Oregon races to distribute rent assistance as eviction moratorium comes to an end - OregonLive

Xochitl Garnica rented a two-acre farm on Sauvie Island shortly before the start of the coronavirus pandemic, hoping to expand the farming collective she runs with two other farmers.

The timing was far from ideal. Many of the farmers markets Garnica had planned to attend last year were canceled, and she could no longer teach in-person farming workshops. Her husband lost his job in construction amid the pandemic as well and has been unable to look for full-time work because he has to care for the couple’s two children and nephew.

Before the pandemic, the family was barely keeping up with their bills. Now, they’ve fallen behind. They will have until next February to repay the $2,600 they owe in missed rent on their two-bedroom Tigard apartment — but the family of five could still face eviction next month if they can’t find a way to cobble together enough money to pay their July rent on time.

“We live in fear that we’re going to lose our home,” Garnica said. “Quite honestly, we don’t have a Plan B.”

The state’s eviction moratorium, which has been in place since early in the pandemic, is set to expire at the end of this month. Lawmakers gave Oregon renters until Feb. 28, 2022, to repay overdue rent accumulated between April 2020 and this month, averting massive bills for past-due rent on July 1.

But there are no protections in place for renters who can’t pay their rent on time in July and beyond, even as Oregon’s unemployment rate remains elevated and many businesses are closed or operating at reduced capacity.

Oregon has the money to help many of those renters — but that assistance may not come in time. Nonprofits and city agencies that distribute rent assistance say they won’t have enough time to process an onslaught of applications before the eviction moratorium expires.

Rep. Julie Fahey, D-Eugene, the chair of the Oregon House of Representatives’ housing committee, introduced legislation Monday that would protect renters from eviction for 60 days after they apply for rent assistance and notify their landlords.

Legislators, however, have just two weeks to act on the amendment to Senate Bill 278 before the end of the session.

“I’m terrified at what the expiration of the eviction moratorium could mean,” said Kim McCarty, executive director for the Community Alliance of Tenants. “In other communities in the United States, what it has meant is eviction filings by the hundreds within 24 hours after the moratorium ended. Why would Oregon be any different?”

Deborah Imse, executive director of Multifamily NW, an industry group that represents landlords, said the amendment would put more strain on landlords and the state should do more to ensure that the renters most at risk of housing instability are prioritized for rent assistance as soon as possible.

“The Legislature is proposing we extend the moratorium another two months to buy more time,” Imse said in a statement. “Many housing providers have not received rent for 15 months. How does the Legislature propose housing providers buy more time?”

ASSISTANCE DELAYED

The U.S. Census Bureau surveyed more than 940,000 Oregon renters in their most recent Household Pulse Survey in May. More than 51,000 of the Oregon households surveyed said they were behind on rent payments. And nearly 17% of Oregon renters surveyed said they had no confidence or only slight confidence that they could pay next month’s rent.

In May, the state unveiled a new rent assistance program seeded with $204 million in federal dollars, the largest rent assistance program that Oregon has ever administered. Oregon Housing and Community Services, the state agency administering the fund, said it couldn’t roll out the Oregon Emergency Rent Assistance Program until it received guidance from the federal government on how the funds could be spent. That delayed the launch until mid-May.

The state developed a new online application portal in an attempt to streamline the rent assistance process by allowing tenants to go directly to the state rather than seeking assistance through local community groups. More than 8,000 households had requested more than $56 million in rent and utility assistance through the program as of June 7.

However, those community groups across the state are still being tasked with reviewing and approving applications. And those agencies say they won’t have enough time to process the majority before rent comes due on July 1 – and that the new state system has glitches that have slowed down processing even further.

Kemp Shuey, executive director at Community Action, which serves Washington County, said his agency was processing about 35 rent assistance applications a month before the pandemic. They’ve been able to ramp up their capacity over the last year by hiring additional staff, and Shuey said his agency could now process up to 800 a month.

But even that wouldn’t meet the need. He said the state had already referred 1,500 applications to his agency through the Oregon Emergency Rent Assistance Program as of last week. Applications for the program opened May 19.

“We are not going to be able to serve everybody who needs rent assistance to stave off eviction by July 1,” Shuey said. “When you look at the number of what we have waiting for us versus what we have the capacity to do in two and a half weeks, it’s impossible to meet that full need.”

Shuey and Jimmy Jones, executive director for the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency, which serves Marion and Polk counties, said the state’s application portal is further slowing the speed at which agencies can process applications.

Jones said the portal allows tenants to request funding for past-due rent and up to three months of future rent but doesn’t directly ask tenants whether they are capable of paying their July rent. He said that has made it difficult for community agencies to prioritize the renters who could be at greatest risk of eviction in July.

The state has asked agencies to follow up with renters who have not requested funding for July rent to make sure they are aware of the expiring moratorium, but reaching out to each applicant individually takes time.

Jones said the application process has also been confusing for some renters, and about 40% of the applications his agency is receiving from the state are incomplete, which leads to longer processing times. Even after applications are approved, Jones said a glitch in the state’s software system has prevented providers from identifying applications as ready for funding.

“We have this slow-motion disaster playing out in front of us,” Jones said. “There’s going to be a good number of evictions that may have been avoided if we used a different system.”

Before the state launched the new program in May, Oregon had already provided more than $113 million in rent assistance to help nearly 21,000 households through two previous pandemic programs, according to Oregon Housing and Community Services spokesperson Connor McDonnell. (McDonnell said those numbers could include some overlap.) Renters applied for that money through local community agencies, which spent the majority of last year ramping up their rent assistance programs.

Jones said his agency would have been able to get the new wave of rent assistance out to tenants more quickly if the state had allowed agencies to distribute the money through their existing systems rather than launching a new software program.

McDonnell said last week that the state was working to fix the software in the new Oregon Emergency Rent Assistance system.

“We are aware of some glitches in the OERAP system which is the unfortunate reality of software development and implementation,” McDonnell said in an email, adding, “The system is working, and applications are moving through processing across the state.”

Another program aimed at landlords, the Landlord Compensation Fund, was plagued by software glitches early on, which led to major delays this spring. Through that program, the state has so far given about $73 million to landlords to forgive the rent of approximately 22,000 households, but landlords didn’t start receiving those checks until May, five months after lawmakers approved funding for the program.

NEW PROTECTIONS POSSIBLE

Fahey, the chair of the Oregon House of Representatives’ Committee on Housing, said lawmakers didn’t fully understand the extent of the delay in getting rent assistance out the door until they heard from Oregon Housing and Community Services officials and several community action agencies during a hearing on June 4.

Fahey said lawmakers have been trying to stave off an onslaught of evictions in July ever since. She said she would support an extension of Oregon’s eviction moratorium but that she doesn’t see a political path for that to happen in the final two weeks of the legislative session.

Instead, Fahey introduced an amendment Monday afternoon that would give Oregon tenants who apply for rent assistance protection from eviction for an additional 60 days after they provide their landlords with documentation that they’ve applied for aid. The legislation would sunset on Feb. 28, 2022.

She said providing short-term protections for tenants on the verge of receiving rent assistance will help keep renters in their homes while also being fair to landlords who in some cases have gone without rent from tenants for over a year.

“It doesn’t make sense from a public policy standpoint to allow for evictions of Oregonians when we have half a billion dollars of federal rent assistance coming to our state and folks who have applied for assistance might be stuck in a backlog,” Fahey said.

The amendment, however, would not help tenants who may not qualify for rent assistance or may be unaware of the aid available to them. And delays in distributing the funds could free landlords to move ahead with eviction proceedings after 60 days.

McDonnell, of Oregon Housing and Community Services, said his agency is requesting $30 million from the state to support the community organizations tasked with distributing rent assistance.

But for now, renters like Garnica in Tigard remain in limbo as they wait to see what resources they will be able to access and what additional protections the state may offer them before the looming expiration of the eviction moratorium at the end of the month.

“We don’t want a free ride,” Garnica said. “We just need a break and more support to be able to provide for our families, pay our bills and rebuild.”

-- Jamie Goldberg | jgoldberg@oregonian.com | @jamiebgoldberg

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