McKee: R.I. needs to ‘up our game’ on approving rent relief for families

PROVIDENCE – Rhode Island has more than $352 million available for landlords whose renters have fallen behind on payments, and for renters to pay their housing costs. But very little of it has been processed.

Gov. Daniel J. McKee on Thursday, at a press briefing, said he didn’t think enough Rhode Islanders were aware of the RentReliefRI program, which uses federal funds.

It has a deadline. The state initiated the program on April 1 and the funds have to be committed by the end of the year.

“We need to up our game on that,” McKee said Thursday. “We’ve only provided about $1 million worth of rental relief as we sit. We’re sitting on two and a half months.”

On June 30, McKee said, the state will make an announcement about a forthcoming program offering up to $50 million in mortgage assistance for families impacted by the pandemic. He did not elaborate on the eligibility requirements, but said both the rental relief and the mortgage assistance programs would have fairly flexible terms for how much families could earn and qualify.

R.I. Housing and Mortgage Finance Corp., which is administering the RentReliefRI program, said technical problems initially delayed the processing.

The agency has since switched tech vendors and is catching up on the backlog of applications, according to a spokeswoman.

R.I. Housing operates a dashboard that provides an overview of applications. According to that data, 5,541 applications had been made through Thursday for assistance with either rent or utilities, or both.

Of that number, 1,361 applications have been completed, but only 140 requests have received final approval.

The program requires information from tenants as well as landlords, regardless of who applies. Some of the holdup is waiting for that information. The dashboard indicates 475 applications are held up waiting on tenant information; another 163 are waiting on landlords.

RentReliefRI has criteria but the requirements are more flexible than some eviction-related programs that Rhode Island started earlier in the pandemic. Families can earn up to 80% of the area median income and qualify, if they had an increase in expenses or a decrease in income due to the pandemic.

The program allows people to apply for help with either utilities or rent, or both, and does not require an eviction notice or formal notice of rent being late, according to Christine Hunsinger, a spokeswoman for R.I. Housing.

In some cases, emails from landlords, or screen shots of web pages, have served as documentation.

The program is now getting about 33 new applications a day, she said. R.I. Housing has a phone bank with 130 people on it to answer information about the program.

McKee said he thought a lack of advertising about the program was a problem. In the press briefing Thursday, when asked what the problem was, he responded: “I don’t think people know about it. I think we need to invest in paid media.”

When contacted after the briefing, Hunsinger said R.I. Housing is advertising the program on RIPTA buses, on Spanish-language radio stations and on social media.

The funding for the program comes from two federal acts designed to allay pandemic related impacts. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021 provided the first $200 million while another $152 million was provided in the American Rescue Act of 2021.

Mary MacDonald is a staff writer for the PBN. Contact her at macdonald@pbn.com.