Massachusetts may be in line to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to renters from the federal government thanks to the latest COVID-19 relief bill, but the infrastructure needed to quickly distribute those funds to tenants and landlords is still getting up and running.
When he announced in mid-October that he would not extend the state’s eviction moratorium once it expired Oct. 17, Gov. Charlie Baker said the state would also plow $100 million into a pre-pandemic rental assistance program for families in danger of getting evicted, called Residential Assistance for Families in the Transition, to attempt to cover the hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid rent statewide. Estimates by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council put the need at around $42 million for October alone.
Under the relief bill that passed Congress Monday, Massachusetts could get around $460 million in rental aid, on top of that.
But housing advocates and landlords alike say the money has been slow in arriving in renters’ and owners’ pockets even as eviction cases have now returned to pre-pandemic levels, with around 4,000 cases filed since Nov. 2.
“We need more time to get the Governor’s Eviction Diversion Initiative up to full speed so we can disperse more relief dollars to tenants and landlords, while also getting the mediation and legal services aspects of the program fully operational and staffed,” Joe Kriesberg, president of the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations, told Banker & Tradesman in an email Monday.
The delays have largely been due to the small pre-pandemic size of the RAFT program, which typically handled around $20 million per year. It neither had the staff nor the bureaucratic procedures to handle the sudden increase in need when the Baker administration picked it as the primary vehicle for emergency rental assistance.
“RAFT was geared for a time when you could have more one-on-onetime with applicants,” said Stefanie Coxe, executive director of the Regional Housing Network of Massachusetts, which administers the RAFT program for the state.
For example, Coxe said, pre-pandemic one of the regional agencies that handles RAFT cases under The Regional Housing Network’s umbrella only had four staffers working the beat. Now, Coxe’s nonprofit has upwards of 560 new hires and temporary workers handling the program statewide, with the last of those hires being brought on board earlier this month.
“That’s a pretty enormous challenge to staff up to that level,” she said.
While the RAFT program now has the staff to handle the influx, its applications are still very time-consuming. Each one takes between six and seven hours of staff time to process, Coxe said, thanks to the amount of data that must be collected with each application. The Regional Housing Network has proposed a number of changes to the program’s design that are aimed at reducing data collection and processes to just “mission-critical” items.
“Our view is that it has to be a straight pandemic relief fund. You say you need help and tell us how much you need help, we pay you out,” Coxe said.
The Department of Housing and Community Development is currently considering the changes, an agency spokesperson said, but did not provide a timeline for the decision. DHCD is also analyzing bottlenecks in the process to reduce turnaround time, different ways to prioritize applications if an eviction process has begun and other existing tools held by other departments that can speed up verification of applicants’ income, the spokesperson said.
At the same time, a legal assistance project started by the Baker administration as the eviction moratorium ended is looking to ramp up services and bring on a host of new attorneys to represent the poorest tenants in these cases.
The COVID Eviction Legal Help Project is hiring 48 attorneys, 48 paralegals, 24 senior lawyers, and 17 intake workers.
The Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development funds the COVID Eviction Legal Help Project with help from about $8.6 million from the federal CARES Act. The project officially started on Oct. 16 when DHCD reached out to Massachusetts Legal Assistance Corporation to help scale up a coordinated statewide legal services delivery system.
State House News Service contributed to this report.
