Written by: Natalia Perez
California is already enduring a severe homeless crisis, and it is soon going spike up as the state ended its eviction moratorium on Thursday. Now, many renters that are in debt face the prospect of being forced out of their homes.
Friday officially marked the countdown for California to seclude tenants against a tremendous tide of renters who face eviction. Until September 30, state law automatically banned landlords from evicting people for unpaid rent. Now, tenants are looking for applied assistance from the state to still pay off their rents on time. The aftershock of the moratorium is something that indebted renters are facing nationwide after the Supreme Court invalidated a federal moratorium.
The applied assistance program has a package of $5.2 billion of federal dollars to assist in rent owed by tenants who lost jobs. The program helps its users pay rent, and protects them from eviction. On Monday, more than 309,000 households have applied for assistance.
According to Yahoo Finance, the state has paid nearly $650 million to about 55,000 households so far, and they have approved another $950 million in assistance that is in the process of being paid. Yet it’s unclear how many applications are still pending.
Ora Prochovnick, director of litigation and policy at the Eviction Defense Collaborative (EDC), recently said in an interview with Yahoo Finance that “there is absolutely a very high number of pending applications where the paperwork has been submitted to the state, but the funds have not yet been released.”
Moreover, Prochovnick is skeptical that the federal funds even offer enough relief to cover all those in need of help. “Absolutely not. It sounds like a huge number and it’s simply not going to touch the problem and there will need to be additional funds,” Prochovnick added.
Gavin Newsom has prolonged this dire situation for over months, and now he must reconcile with the inevitable consequences. The homelessness crisis is something that the governor has been struggling with since day one when he took office. Now as the problem is sure to ramp up, it is looking rather bleak that he will have any solutions for it. What is clear is that federal funds and moratoriums is not the real answer. Perhaps Newsom should focus more on promoting job growth and not stunting businesses through mandates and other forms of restriction.
