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When we spoke on the phone this week, Rakhi Agrawal glanced at the pile of papers on her desk. “My eviction notice – it’s here on my desk,” she said.
It was a long way for Agrawal, who moved to Austin to work in nonprofit development, to get this eviction notice.
At the beginning of the pandemic, in March 2020, Agrawal lost her job. Unable to find another job, she applied for unemployment benefits and Texas SNAP food allowance. That qualified her for rent support through the Emergency Needs Relief Program for City Tenants, which paid her rent through the end of 2020.
But then in January her problems really started. With unchanged circumstances, Agrawal reapplied for the city program. But even after several phone calls to follow up on her application, she received a rejection letter stating that she had not responded quickly enough to the program’s request for documentation.
In dismay, she applied to the Texas State Rent Relief Program and the Travis County Emergency Rental Assistance Program. But before she could raise money from either program, her landlord sent an eviction notice. Agrawal took out loans from friends to pay the balance and moved out to avoid eviction.
She is now waiting for an answer from the district as to whether she can get help in the future.
As reported last week, Travis County is trying to spend 65 percent of its federal aid before a federal deadline. District Judge Andy Brown and other commissioners asked how the district could expedite the disbursement of funds.
It’s not just a Travis County’s problem. Molly Jensen, executive director of Austin Tenants Council, said the county is in the same position as most communities trying to distribute the remaining $ 45 billion to tenant relief and evacuation funds set by the federal government.
According to a recent report in the New York Times, about 89 percent of federal rental subsidies have not yet been issued.
“Most (municipalities) have a really difficult time,” said Jensen, “because nationwide there has been too little investment in housing aid and evacuation protection measures for many, many years.”
This created a situation where municipalities with limited staff and outdated technical infrastructure were simultaneously inundated with unprecedented levels of funding and inquiries.
The result has been confusion among applicants, a scramble from the county staff and a lack of contact with those who need help most and who are unable to navigate the county system easily.
But there are ways to get the money out faster. Jensen cited the city’s RENT program as an example. While the county used its General Fund to pay out aid last year, the city of Austin developed its own process and redesigned it with each application cycle.
The city also worked with partners such as the Austin Tenants Council to directly reach people who are having difficulty navigating the online system. On-site translators helped applicants who spoke a language other than English. The system is not perfect, stressed Jensen, but the city has made great strides in the past year in building the necessary infrastructure to complete the task in the allotted time.
Why is the county unable to reproduce the city’s results?
“A lot of people need extra help to access the application process,” said Jensen, and Travis County just doesn’t have the staff to make this easier.
As tough as the process was, Agrawal is grateful that her earlier experiences as a first-generation college student, as a teacher in underserved communities, and as a community organizer have helped her navigate the bureaucracy.
But what about families with no internet access, or those who have no experience filling out online applications, or people who don’t speak English?
“You should pick us up from where we are,” said Agrawal. “It scares me too much. How do you navigate in this system? “
One reason the city has been more effective at outreach, Jensen said, is because it realizes when it doesn’t meet community centers and other hangouts, “a lot of people don’t know it is there.”
Jensen said many renters who call Austin Tenants Council live in the county and are not eligible for the city’s RENT program. Little do not know that Travis County has a separate rental assistance program they qualify for and are directed to the application page by Tenants Council staff.
She recommended that the district team contact the city team who are overseeing the distribution so they could give some tips on how to contact them. She said there was efforts by Congress to persuade the federal government to extend its deadline as many of the communities would have to create these programs from scratch. Another problem was the difficulty of tracking down the required documentation and giving employees time to process it. The programs are starting to accept self-certification letters, which should further streamline the process in the near future.
All of this is happening as a national evacuation crisis looms. The US Supreme Court ruled last week that the Centers for Disease Control have no power to enforce an eviction moratorium without action by the courts in the courts this fall.
City residents have local safeguards that have minimized evictions during the pandemic compared to other major cities in Texas. Current rules ensure that tenants who are three months or less behind on rent cannot be evicted (if rent is less than $ 2,475 per month), require landlords to apply for rent allowance, before proceeding with the eviction and give the tenants affected by Covid a 60-day period to repay the rent.
When asked to comment on the situation, the Travis County Public Information Office referred the Austin Monitor to a briefing during today’s session of the Travis County Commissioners Court. Commissioners will learn about the county’s overall Covid-19 response and should provide answers to questions they posted last week on how the county can speed up its payout pace.
Editor’s Note: Andy Brown serves on the board of directors of the Capital of Texas Media Foundation, the not-for-profit parent company of Austin Monitor.
The Austin Monitor’s work is made possible through community donations. Although our reporting includes donors from time to time, we take great care to keep business and editorial efforts separate while maintaining transparency. A full list of donors can be found here and our Code of Ethics is explained here.
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