He was due $45,000 from a tenant who stopped paying his $2,500-a-month rent in March 2020, his application shows. 30, a deadline state officials have sworn they will meet, despite the slow rollout so far.īogdan Manescu, a property owner in Holbrook, NY, is among those who has so far been paid-though the program still only covers about two-thirds of the debt. Under federal guidelines, states must distribute 65 percent of the rental assistance funding by Sept. OTDA says another roughly $500 million is earmarked for specific qualifying landlords. That’s still just about 5 percent of the total fund since applications opened June 1. As of Monday, OTDA has distributed 8,305 payments to landlords totaling more than $114.1 million, the agency said. Landlords who seek reimbursement through ERAP agree to house their tenants for at least another year, but checks have only just started reaching some owners. Property owners whose low-income tenants owe rent from the pandemic months can receive up to a year of back rent, plus three future months, from the federally-funded pot of money. The state’s beleaguered Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) has gotten off to a rocky start, adding to the confusion for tenants and landlords. For hundreds of thousands of them, help should be on the way. More than 830,000 New Yorkers, including 512,063 in New York City, owe rent arrears, according to researchers at the policy group National Atlas Equity. Before the state imposed coronavirus restrictions in March 2020, there were 130,000 pending eviction cases in New York City, but only about 50,000 of those were “actively litigated eviction cases,” according to OCA. The exact number of eviction cases in New York is hard to pin down because many tenants and landlords resolve their issues out of court. The state’s Office of Court Administration (OCA) said there were 182 eviction proceedings filed citywide on Friday, the day after the Supreme Court ruling, and two more Saturday. “It’s going to snowball at some point and it’s going to start rolling down the hill. “When you see that line stretch down the block and wrap around the corner, you’ll know things are back to normal,” Auwarter said. On Monday morning, there were never more than 10 people waiting to enter and speak with a clerk. Prior to the pandemic, hundreds would queue up along Grand Concourse to enter the court and judges held hearings in elevator bays. “It will be a gradual uptick,” said BronxWorks Assistant Executive Director Scott Auwarter, whose office overlooks the line outside Bronx Housing Court. But they say it will likely lead to an uptick in new filings and force more and more tenants to visit court in-person. Housing experts say the ruling cut to the core of the eviction ban, but is not likely to fuel an immediate surge in evictions because cases take months to resolve, and housing courts are already strained. 12 specifically struck down a provision in the state law that allowed tenants to use “financial hardship declaration forms”-sworn statements that they were financially impacted by the COVID crisis-as an automatic defense against eviction. The decision has added another layer of fear and frustration for tenants, landlords and their representatives as they contend with the state’s ongoing eviction rules. Supreme Court blocked a key piece of New York’s eviction moratorium, giving property owners a chance to argue their cases against tenants who owe back rent in housing court. Ortiz’s notice arrived two days after the U.S. “I don’t want them to drop me out of the apartment.” The property owner and management company did not respond to requests for comment. Ortiz said she thought she had done everything right to avoid eviction and make her landlord whole. On Saturday night, however, she received a notice from her LLC landlord informing her that they planned to start eviction proceedings. She, like many others who applied for the rent relief, is still waiting. Her employer cut her hours and she has struggled to catch up on her arrears, she said, but she filed for aid through the state’s $2.2 billion Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) in early June. Ortiz said she owes about $3,000 in rent dating back to late last year, when she fell behind after missing a month of work because she had COVID-19. Monday clutching two bags of housing documents, including her rental assistance application number and email print-outs proving her correspondence with the management company that runs her building. Nursing home aide Ruth Ortiz stood outside Bronx Housing Court at 9 a.m. 16, days after the Supreme Court struck down a central part of New York’s COVID eviction moratorium.
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