June 22 update: The Senate on Tuesday repassed Senate Bill 278. The bill, which now heads to Gov. Kate Brown's desk, will provide tenants eviction relief for 60 days if they can show their landlord they have applied for federal rental assistance.
June 17 update: The Oregon House on Thursday amended and passed Senate Bill 278, which would protect renters from eviction if they can show their landlords that they applied for federal rental assistance, even if the funds haven't yet arrived. Now, the House's amended bill returns to the Senate. "There is an urgent need for this bill to pass before June 30," Gov. Kate Brown said Thursday.
Thousands of Oregonians risk losing their homes next month unless legislators or Gov. Kate Brown extend the state’s eviction moratorium beyond July 1. And the only relief at hand for renters remains bogged down in logistics.
At least 6,700 people, as of June 1, are asking for a portion of $204 million in federal rent assistance that became available in May so they can pay their July rent.
The exact number of people who face eviction is impossible to pin down. However, one thing is certain: Laura Venegas of Portland and her children are among them.
She and her family already know how it feels to lose their home. They lost it once before.
“I was able to find permanent work, and we were fortunate enough to be able to get back into our home — a second chance that most don’t get,” Venegas said during a virtual town hall May 25 hosted by the Community Alliance of Tenants.
“Then COVID hit and changed everything,” she said. “I had to stay home to provide care and schooling for my son.”
Venegas finds herself further and further behind in her rent to the point where she and her children face being homeless again next month.
“There are thousands of families with homes similar to my story,” she said. “I hope we can extend the eviction moratorium so, like myself, thousands of others don’t end up losing the only place they call home.”
That appears unlikely to happen.
Charles Boyle, the governor’s deputy communications director, told Street Roots that Brown already signed Senate Bill 282 to give renters until Feb. 28 next year to pay their back rent but that current rent will still be due come July.
If they need money for rent from July to September, Boyle said, they can apply for help through programs such as the Oregon Emergency Rental Assistance Program.
Apply for rent assistance
Visit OregonRentalAssistance.org to apply for emergency aid to pay rent.
At this point, he said, Brown plans to let the moratorium expire on schedule.
“Gov. Brown has worked since the beginning of this pandemic to keep Oregonians housed and to provide a range of resources to support both renters and their landlords,” he said.
She should do more, Kim McCarty told Street Roots, and so should legislators.
McCarty, executive director of the Community Alliance of Tenants, attended an informational meeting on rent assistance June 4 hosted by the House Committee on Housing. “What I heard makes me panic,” she said.
‘Time is needed’
Yes, people can apply for help. However, in many cases, eviction notices will arrive next month well in advance of any public assistance.
“No emergency rental assistance checks were cut last week,” McCarty told Street Roots on June 7. “We do not know how long it will take to get most applicants help.”
“If the mail does not arrive on time, how can we expect help to arrive in time to stop evictions in Oregon?”
With Oregon landlords reporting 13% of tenants behind in rent, McCarty said more than 800,000 households stand in danger next month.
“If the mail does not arrive on time, how can we expect help to arrive in time to stop evictions in Oregon?” she said. “Time is needed. That is why the governor needs to extend the eviction moratorium.”
State Rep. Jack Zika (R-Redmond) asked at the June 4 Housing Committee meeting how people at immediate risk of eviction are identified and how soon they can expect checks.
Margaret Salazar, the executive director of the Oregon Housing and Community Services Department, described a complicated process.
“So, the eviction likelihood is data collected from self-reported data collection in the tenant application,” Salazar said. “And so within that application, it will solicit that question to the household, and then what happens is once that information is collected, it is then given a weighting factor relevant to eviction likelihood, using resources to maintain housing stability.”
State Rep. Julie Fahey (D-Eugene) chairs the Housing Committee and was unimpressed with that answer.
“It did not have the level of specificity I was looking for,” she told Salazar. “I am very concerned about what happens on July 1. This program had a relatively late start date of May 19, and I have some questions about how long it’s actually going to take to get dollars into people’s hands and whether that’s going to start happening on a meaningful timeline.”
Fahey said she wants to get dollars into people’s hands before the eviction moratorium expires.
“Otherwise,” she said, “they have 10 days before their housing provider can file for eviction.”
Andrea Bell, the director of housing stabilization for the state housing department, acknowledged the problem.
“No time is quick enough,” Bell said. “Candidly, the minute we got these resources, the ideal time would have been the following day. The minute an application comes in, the ideal time is that within 24 hours, dollars go out. We’re talking about people’s lives. We’re talking about the stress and angst of not being able to pay their rent. That is a very real thing.”
Nonetheless, she said, checks will not likely arrive to prevent July evictions.
“The check cutting is a process,” Bell said. “It is a process, and we know that our partners will begin cutting checks across the state within the next month.”
Jimmy Jones, the executive director of the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency, told lawmakers it will likely take at least two weeks from the time an application is submitted until the applicant has the money in hand.
“One of the things that’s very difficult to understand, if you haven’t been on the ground, if you haven’t been distributing these kinds of resources before, is that every potential crisis we face in terms of providing relief is essentially the same,” Jones said.
“It doesn’t matter if we’re discussing the Katrina situation 15 years ago in Louisiana, the ice storm here, or the COVID rental assistance,” he said. “It all starts with what appears to be from the outside as absolute chaos. It works much more slowly. It takes time to get systems built up, human resources in place in order to be able to deliver the kind of resources that are necessary to stem the tide.
“Then in some moment in that — it’s often very difficult to determine where — a critical mass is reached. You begin, really for the first time, to see that there’s momentum building behind this wave of resources that’s coming in, and it begins to make a massive difference.”
Jones urged patience. “There’s so much more money in the system than there’s ever been before,” he said. “It takes just a little time to get adjusted to that and get on our feet.”
Of course, patience is a luxury that often comes with the reliability of a roof and four walls.
‘A wave of evictions in July’
Dawn Abrams, a 62-year-old woman with limited mobility from a neurological condition, waited three years for affordable housing. She wanted to move within the Portland metropolitan area with bus access to groceries, health care and various services.
The best alternative she could find was in rural Molalla — far from anything except a pharmacy more than half a mile away.
“I had to cast the net further out, and that happened to be Molalla,” Abrams told Street Roots. “That’s certainly not ideal. Sometimes you just have to take what is put in front of you. There was a time when you could choose where you live. Now with the housing crisis, that’s not feasible anymore.”
Even under the best of conditions, she said, finding affordable housing is difficult to practically impossible.
“It’s a labyrinth of confusion,” she said. “You end up on a waiting list for years to see what comes up. There were 10 waiting lists that I was on.”
Still, Abrams counts herself lucky. She had no income to lose because of COVID-19. If someone lost a job and was unable to find subsidized housing, even in Molalla, they might well be evicted next month, she said.
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Tom, who worked at a Salem car dealership and asked that Street Roots use only his first name, feels less lucky. He thought he achieved a comfortable middle-class lifestyle for himself and his six children.
When COVID-19 struck, he was laid off and was $14,000 behind in his rent by fall. He and his children lived in a tent. They were denied shelter because Tom and his girlfriend were not married.
They might still be homeless if not being found by outreach workers for the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agency. They helped him get assistance — assistance he didn’t even know was available.
Jones told lawmakers that’s part of the problem. Money is available, but many people don’t realize it until they are up against the wall, and the money won’t arrive soon enough to prevent eviction.
As a result, along with numerous other factors, Jones said, Oregon might well face an eviction crisis next month. The extent of the crisis is hard to predict, he added.
“We don’t have enormously fantastic data on what that eviction crisis might look like,” Jones said. “It’s one of those things we don’t know. We don’t even know what we don’t know about it. It’s one of those unknown unknowns. They’re very difficult to kind of peg and determine what the real level of that eviction crisis is going to be.”
And it’s difficult to respond to the potential crisis under the circumstances, he said.
“I do believe we’re going to see a wave of evictions in July,” he said. “If every single dollar had been deployed to every single client who signed up, we probably still would have seen a very large eviction event in July because we do know there are individuals out there who, for a variety of reasons, are not engaged with services.”
‘Call for an extension’
McCarty said at the Community Alliance of Tenants’ May 25 town hall that state officials need to act.
“There is still time for the state, and specifically the governor, to take action by extending the eviction moratorium,” McCarty said. “We’re still in a public health emergency. The governor still has the authority to call for an extension of the eviction moratorium.”
Salazar said the state has already worked with federal officials to marshal a massive deployment of dollars and resources.
Before the pandemic, her department provided housing stabilization money to local community action agencies, but that amount never exceeded $17 million in a single year.
“To be clear, this has been a historically underfunded system, both from the federal and the state allocations,” Salazar said. “We have just not had the dollars available to meet the great need as we face our homelessness crisis.”
However, she added, the agency now has money to help more people. “We have never seen state and federal policymakers jump into action to provide emergency housing assistance at this scale before,” she said.
Bell offered specific numbers. Oregon Housing and Community Services is now allocating $204 million that became available in May. The agency is administering the program with local partners.
“The program covers past rent and can cover up to three months of future rent and also cover utilities,” Bell said.
Another wave of funding is coming toward late summer or early fall, she said, and includes $282 million.
However, Bell acknowledged getting the money into people’s hands can be problematic.
“It’s confusing and daunting to apply in certain communities,” she said.
“I agree the moratorium has been really hard on people, but I do think we need at least a few more months to get staffed up, to get these programs ready to go, so we don’t have thousands of people falling into eviction purely from logistical issues.”
Deborah Imse, the executive director of Multifamily Northwest, said extending the eviction moratorium won’t help. “Extensions of the moratorium will extend this crisis and lead to further shortages in the rental housing supply,” she told the Housing Committee on June 4.
Katrina Holland, the executive director of the Portland activist group JOIN, countered that legislators may soon see a train wreck in terms of evictions.
The bureaucracy has not caught up with the dollars, Holland told the Housing Committee.
“I agree the moratorium has been really hard on people, but I do think we need at least a few more months to get staffed up, to get these programs ready to go, so we don’t have thousands of people falling into eviction purely from logistical issues,” she said.
“I’ve been warning of this for many, many months, and my hope is that as the Legislature sees this cliff that we’re approaching in a couple of weeks here that we will reconsider doing some sort of a process,” she said.
New York officials extended their eviction moratorium another three months to catch up with paperwork, McCarty said. She urged Oregon lawmakers to do the same.
“We feel that this is really an issue of timing,” McCarty said. “We are so fortunate to have this resource. We know that in other communities where the eviction moratorium has not been extended there are already mass evictions, and our community is no different. So we have to be prepared, and we just have to implore everyone to think about what is in your power to do.”
‘The word would be panic’
Tim Morris, the executive director of the Springfield-Eugene Tenant Association, told lawmakers his organization is braced for impact.
“If I can boil down to one word what we’re hearing on our hotline, the word would be ‘panic,’” Morris said.
“We’re preparing to see landlords completely line up out of the courthouse to file their evictions,” he said. “We’re afraid of what could happen and what may happen and what we think will happen come July 1 if resources aren’t accessible.”
Sybil Hebb, an attorney for the Oregon Law Center, told lawmakers that waiting for resources is not an option for many tenants.
“Once a tenant receives a 10-day notice of termination, if they do not pay their rent in full by the end of that 10 days, they have no further legal defense,” Hebb said.
“There is no wrap-around service that can right that wrong,” she said. “An eviction can proceed even if there’s payment to be made after the expiration of that notice. It does not satisfy or resolve the legal claim that may move forward.”
By not extending the moratorium, Hebb warned lawmakers, they will hurt more than the people who will be evicted next month.
“If we don’t find a way to fix this problem, at least the short-term problem, in the next six weeks, all of the work that the Legislature and the governor and state and federal agencies have put into preserving stability and preventing the pandemic from causing generational displacement and generational harm -- all that work will be for naught if people are allowed to fall off the cliff in July,” she said.
Rep. Fahey agreed. “The staffs of community action agencies will not be able to ramp up by July 1, and even the eviction defense work we’re talking about, just putting resources into that work, that does not help us by July 1,” she said.
Danny Moran, the communications director for Speaker of the House Tina Kotek, D-Portland, said the speaker is sympathetic to people’s concerns.
“Speaker Kotek has championed the eviction moratorium bills over the last year and believes those actions have kept many people housed and safe during the pandemic,” Moran told Street Roots.
“She supports an extension but also understands that’s politically challenging at this point,” he said. “Right now, she’s focused on making sure rental assistance gets out to the people who need it, both for July and back rent.”
He added Kotek knows more work must be done given the scale of the housing crisis and the disproportionate impact the pandemic continues to have on vulnerable Oregonians.
“She has proposed a $650 million total housing package for the 2021-23 biennium, including funding for affordable housing and permanent supportive housing, down payment assistance, homeless services, tenant support and more,” he said.
Mat Randol was just about to move into an apartment in Portland when the pandemic cost him his job and his home. He has a home again for now, he said, but the future is always a question mark.
No matter what happens — or doesn’t happen — at the state level, Randol said at last month’s town hall, that he will continue to do what he always does, what everyone always does. He’ll do the best he can.
“It’s just one of those things where you have to stay down and dig deep and reach out to resources if you have any,” he said. “Luckily, I’m still in my place, my family is OK now, but it’s still a struggle just to work.”