Edwin Bautista was a senior at the University of Texas at Austin and part-time technician at a consulting firm when inflation started to ravage his spending power. After his rent surged past $1,000 a month in early 2021 he feared he would have to move out — until he got a $7,300 lifeline from the federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program.
That kept him in his apartment and even helped him build a small nest egg. Now graduated and working full-time, he’s a first-time homebuyer.
Bautista is one of millions of renters who benefited from temporary programs put in place during the coronavirus pandemic, including restrictions on evictions, income support — and the rental assistance program. One of the most ambitious investments in emergency housing in the nation’s history, it has disbursed $46 billion in aid to state and local governments since early 2021 and kept millions of people in their homes, according to an analysis of government data by Bloomberg News.
With rents still climbing and the economy at risk of a recession, housing advocates are urging the Biden administration to keep helping tenants. That will be hard under legislation signed into law last weekend that suspended the nation’s borrowing limit as it clawed back unused pandemic aid and imposed caps on future increases in the federal budget.
“We are facing an affordable housing crisis in this country, yet Republican lawmakers are insisting on slashing funding for and jeopardizing the future of critical housing affordability programs that support working families,” Sen. Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat, said in a statement.
Surveys conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau show that, on average, 48.46 million people reported being caught up on their rent during the first quarter of this year, 4.7 million more than before the Emergency Rental Assistance Program was put in place as the economy was reeling from shutdowns. Even though the estimated number of renters in the country increased during the period, the number of people behind on rent fell.
“These policies drove eviction filing rates to historic lows,” according to a report from the Eviction Lab. Eviction filings were cut by more than half of 31 cities they sampled, largely due to Covid-era policies, according to the lab, a housing research group at Princeton University.
Nevertheless, Republicans have shown little appetite for continuing pandemic-era programs, including for rent assistance, as they seek to reduce the federal budget deficit.
“Progressives’ attempts to make crisis programs permanent, even after an emergency ends, is just another example of Democrats spending taxpayer money we don’t have,” Rep. Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina Republican and key negotiator on the debt limit bill, said in a statement. “Now it’s time to end this program.”
The U.S. Treasury Department let states, counties and cities use the emergency rent aid in one of three ways: direct assistance to households, housing stability measures and administrative expenses. About $33 billion of the $46 billion was used for direct assistance to more than 7 million households, according to a Bloomberg News estimate of Treasury data.
States, on average, sent 70% of their used funds directly to tenants and landlords, and those that spent most of the money for direct assistance tended to have more tenants up to date on their rent — suggesting the program was having the desired effect.
