NLIHC and National Housing Law Project (NHLP) sent on August 31 a letter to House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters (D-CA) outlining recommendations for Chair Waters’s forthcoming legislation aimed at improving and streamlining distribution of emergency rental assistance (ERA).
The letter urges legislators to adopt key reforms needed to increase accessibility to ERA for low-income renters and ensure rapid and equitable distribution of funds. Such reforms include requiring programs to adopt self-attestation measures, automatically assuming people experiencing homelessness qualify for ERA, and barring programs from requiring tenants to provide a written lease. The reforms would better align guidance for ERA1 and ERA2 by requiring programs to provide direct-to-tenant assistance, and they would offer program administrators who make “good faith efforts to expedite the distribution of low-barrier assistance” safe harbor from funding clawbacks.
The recommendations highlight strategies to encourage program improvement by requiring poor performing programs to develop improvement plans and, in the event programs fail to improve, to hold those programs accountable for poor performance by recapturing and reallocating funds to courts and community-based nonprofit organizations. NLIHC and NHLP warn against allowing landlords to receive ERA without notifying their tenants and without strong renter protections. These recommendations are based on NLIHC’s ongoing analysis of programs’ implementation of ERA, as well as direct input from local advocates and organizations administering ERA programs.
Read the full text of the letter at: https://bit.ly/3kVi1PB