Help tenants get relief they deserve

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the threat of a mass housing crisis has loomed, and we are now perilously close to that threat hitting home.

It does not have to be this way. For months, thousands of New Yorkers have been experiencing financial instability and having a hard time paying mortgages or rent. The Biden administration sought to extend an eviction moratorium but the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that only Congress could do so. Then there’s funding through the federal Emergency Rental Assistance program, which in New York is largely administered by the state and is structured to send money to landlords on behalf of rent-burdened tenants.

Unacceptably, the funding, which can include months of rent plus utility payments, has trickled. That’s true in many places around the country, where only a small percentage of the cash allocated by Congress has been distributed. And it’s true in New York. Up to $2.7 billion in rental assistance is available to low- and moderate-income New Yorkers, according to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office, and the state agency managing the main program has made $203,172,078 in assistance payments and obligated another $605,298,903 through Aug. 23. By the end of July, the state program had logged a mere few thousand applications submitted in Nassau and Suffolk.

The picture on the ground is bad. The Huntington-based nonprofit Housing Help sent a letter to Hochul last week noting that they helped 76 families face to face with rental assistance applications and as of Tuesday, only one had "received their financial aid."

Housing activists and experts point to problem after problem. Some landlords have been slow to fill out their side of the cumbersome paperwork. Federal guidelines and the way those guidelines trickle down to the state and the towns running their own programs, like Hempstead, Islip and Oyster Bay, have resulted in complications. The state application has been onerous and clunky — consider that it was only this month that the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance administering the program added a "save and resume" function. And too many eligible renters are unaware about the program or just haven’t applied.

Also complicating matters are the Supreme Court’s rulings, including one last week, affecting eviction moratoriums at the state and federal levels. Albany is scrambling to find ways to further protect New Yorkers from eviction, which is crucial, but in the meantime those in need should apply for rental assistance. According to OTDA, "your landlord cannot evict you for not paying rent during the covered period" while the application is pending.

Clearly, creating an assistance program like this is a complex challenge, but the end goal is not. Beleaguered renters need a boost, as do small landlords on Long Island who have struggled to pay mortgages or taxes. Hochul has promised to improve on some of the relief program’s bureaucratic holdups, and invest more in marketing and outreach to improve awareness of the program. That’s the bare minimum. Well-intentioned government efforts still need to be well-run.