California authorities will pay for debtors all rent overdue during the pandemic

Governor Gavin Newsom has announced that California will pay overdue rent that was accumulated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Writes about it News Week.

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According to Jason Elliot, Newsom's senior adviser on housing and homelessness, the state's $ 5,2 billion in congressional bailout assistance is enough to pay back rent arrears. However, according to a report by the California Department of Housing and Community Development, only $ 31 million of the $ 32 million in rental assistance had been paid by May 490.

“We must do everything possible to return to the starting point where we were in December 2019. Anything else is exploiting the crisis,” said Keith Becker, a property manager in Sonoma County.

Newsom says California will pay all overdue rents accumulated in the nation's most populous state due to the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

An unresolved question remains whether California will continue to ban evictions for unpaid rent after June 30, a pandemic-related regulation that was intended to be temporary but is difficult to reverse.

Federal eviction protections also expire on June 30th. California adopted its own protections that affected more people than federal protections.

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Newsom and state legislators are meeting privately over protections as part of negotiations for the state's roughly $ 260 billion budget. The extension of the eviction ban will likely give California more time to spend all of its money on unpaid rent. But landlords and tenant advocacy groups argue over how long this renewal should last.

"Expecting people to be back on their feet and ready to pay rent on July 1 is completely unfair," said Kelly Lloyd, a 43-year-old single mother who says she hasn't worked full-time since the pandemic began in March 2020.

Lloyd — a member of the advocacy group Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment — must pay $1 a month for a two-bedroom, two-bathroom rent-controlled apartment in the Crenshaw neighborhood of south Los Angeles.

But she says she has $ 30 in debt after she was out of work for most of the past year and looked after her two children as kindergartens closed.

This debt is likely to be covered by the state. But Lloyd said she recently lost her job at a real estate agency and still hasn't found another. She fears that she could be evicted if the protection period expires.

“Just because a state is open doesn’t mean people have access to their jobs,” Lloyd said.

Becker says the late lease payments put financial pressure on the owners, who he said were "okay with it."

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But they were tired of the endless protections he noted were aimed at addressing a public health emergency rather than being permanent.

The state is in no hurry to distribute $ 5,2 billion, and it is unlikely that it will be able to spend all of it before June 30. The California Department of Housing and Community Development does not identify 12 cities and 10 counties with their own rental assistance programs.

“It's hard to create a big new program overnight,” said Representative David Chiu, a San Francisco Democrat and chairman of the Assembly Housing and Community Development Committee. “It has been a challenge to educate millions of struggling renters and homeowners about the law.”

Landlords cite the state's rapid economic recovery as a reason not to extend the eviction moratorium. Since February, California has created 495 new jobs. In April alone, California accounted for 000% of all new US jobs. Newsom lifted all restrictions on businesses this week and announced the state's grand opening.

While employment in mid-to-high-wage jobs has surpassed pre-pandemic levels, employment rates for people earning less than $ 27 a year have dropped more than 000% since January 38, according to data from Opportunity Insights, an economic tracker from Harvard University.

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“The stock market may be fine, we may be technically reopened, but people in low-wage jobs, which are disproportionately people of color, are not back yet,” said Madeline Howard, a senior attorney at the Western Center on Law and Poverty.

Some advocates are asking the state to maintain the ban on evictions until the unemployment rate among low-wage workers drops to pre-pandemic levels. This is similar to how officials are imposing restrictions on businesses in counties where COVID-19 infection rates were higher, while those with lower infection rates could resume operations faster.

Defenders say they were encouraged when Newsom said he wanted to extend eviction protection beyond June 30.

“We are optimistic,” said Francisco Duenas, executive director of Housing Now California. “We definitely need that protection as part of the recovery.”

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