By Manuela Tobias. CalMatters
Eviction protections for thousands of California households still waiting in line to receive payments from the state's multibillion-dollar rent relief program expired Thursday.
Since September 2020, the Legislature has passed and Governor Gavin Newsom has signed four laws protecting tenants from eviction who were unable to pay rent due to COVID-19.
The most recent extension protected until June 30 tenants who had applied for rent relief from the $5 billion state program before the March 31 deadline but had not yet received a response or payments. Those tenants can now be taken to court by their landlords.
“It’s highly unlikely that they will complete all of these applications before June 30, when eviction protections expire,” said Sarah Treuhaft, vice president of research at PolicyLink, a nonprofit that has been reviewing the state’s rent relief program, during a news conference this week.
"This means they are likely to be evicted and eventually get rental assistance," he stressed.
Debra Carlton, senior lobbyist for the California Apartment Association, said they have asked their members not to take tenants with pending applications to court.
The state Department of Housing and Community Development, which administers the program through a contractor, said July 1 that it had approved all completed applications for eligible tenants.
Geoffrey Ross, the program's deputy director in charge, said they are still processing 13,000 applications that are missing documentation or represent an appeal following a denial. They hope to clear all pending applications by early August.
The rent relief program has paid 339,000 households an average of $11,000 for a total of nearly $4 billion, according to the state's public data dashboard. Checks will soon be on the way to about 16,000 households approved this week.
The gap between completed and approved applications has narrowed significantly over the past week as case management has ramped up.
On June 30, the program's dashboard showed that about 404,000 people had completed their applications. Late this morning, after this story was originally published, the dashboard was updated to show just 352,000 completed applications.
In that regard, Ross said that more than 70,000 applicants were removed from the queue and issued rejections due to account inactivity.
Those applicants with incomplete applications were contacted at least three times and given at least 20 days to respond, often longer, he said.
Using data from June 23, PolicyLink, which has been reviewing weekly program data from the state through Public Records Act requests, found more than 28,000 initial applicants and 57,000 reapplicants have yet to hear back from the program.
So Ross, of the housing department, said the data, although produced by the state, is "flawed in interpretation," but declined to comment on specifics.
Horne LLP, a Mississippi-based accounting firm that specializes in disaster relief, will receive a maximum payment of $278 million to distribute federal rental relief funds capped at $4.5 billion, according to a contract renewal dated April 1 that CalMatters obtained through the Public Records Act on June 17.
The housing department could not say how much the company had been paid to date.
State Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, an Oakland Democrat and co-author of the latest extension, acknowledged that the program has been “incredibly frustrating.” She said she had been assured by the state housing department that her qualified applications would be paid.
“I think it’s no secret that it’s had its challenges,” he said. “And while I sympathize with some of the challenges we’ve had as a state government in terms of dealing with a global pandemic that none of us anticipated, it’s also our job as a government to function well, especially when you’re talking about critical social safety nets.”
But there is a silver lining for tenant advocates. A key part of the now-expired law was the prevention of stricter local anti-eviction measures, many of which are now set to take effect, including in Los Angeles County.
The state faces at least two lawsuits over the program from tenant advocates, who argue it has denied funding to qualifying tenants and is not covering the amount of rent debt originally promised.
As of June 17, more than 135,000 people, or nearly a third of all households, who applied for rental assistance had their applications denied, according to data CalMatters obtained from the housing department through the Public Records Act.
That number skyrocketed in recent weeks as the program ended. The lawsuit, which cites the same data set, says tenants receive little to no explanation for their denials, making it difficult to challenge the final decision.
“Tenants are facing eviction even as their landlords receive these giant checks and tenants who are eligible for assistance are being denied these cryptic notices that don’t tell them why. It just doesn’t make sense,” said Madeline Howard, a senior attorney with the Western Center on Law & Poverty, one of the groups suing the state over the program.
The housing department’s Ross couldn’t provide specific numbers on denials but said about half of applicants are denied eligibility because they make too much money, don’t reside in a location covered by the state program, requested a time period outside of the program’s guidelines or couldn’t prove their tenure or the impact the pandemic has had on their ability to pay rent.
The other half of the denials were due to incomplete or inactive applications.
He said an unspecified number of applications were fraudulent or had been submitted multiple times.
She added that tenants with incomplete applications are told which section they need to provide further evidence, but are not limited to specific documents. She also noted that they were given instructions on how to contact their case managers for help.
Wicks said the latest state budget, approved this week, includes nearly $2 billion to repay the state for a line of credit opened earlier this year to pay tenants who applied before March 31, though it does not include new funding for rent relief.
The program covered rent for up to 18 months between April 1, 2020, and March 31, 2022, for low-income tenants who were financially impacted by COVID-19.
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