Several key protections for renters that were enacted during the pandemic ran out at the end of September. Are those efforts still needed? What should renter and landlord protection look like moving forward? We hear from Community Alliance of Tenants Executive Director Kim McCarty and Jason Miller, legislative director for the Oregon Rental Housing Association, a group which represents landlords.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: The last pandemic-related statewide eviction protections in Oregon have now lapsed. The so-called safe harbor protections for tenants who had applied for emergency rental assistance were in force through September 30th. Now that these protections have ended, what if anything should replace them? We’re going to get two perspectives on this right now. In a few minutes we’ll talk to a representative from the Oregon Rental Housing Association. But we start with Kim McCarty. She is the executive director of the Community Alliance of Tenants. Kim McCarty, welcome.
Kim McCarty: Good afternoon.
Miller: Good afternoon to you. Let’s start with what just ended. Can you remind us how the so-called safe harbor protections worked?
McCarthy: What just ended at the end of this month were the safe harbor protections. So with those protections, if a household was behind on rent due to the pandemic and they applied for emergency rental assistance, they were able to tell their landlord in the application process that I can’t be evicted and this gives me an opportunity to pay this back rent and an eviction won’t happen while that process is happening.
Miller: How successful from your perspective was this particular program?
McCarthy: It was hugely successful in the sense that there were thousands of households throughout Oregon … We knew that during the pandemic, over 90,000 households were saying that they were at risk of houselessness because they couldn’t pay their rent because they were sick, because of job loss, etc. So that definitely helped stave off mass evictions and also kept our landlords whole so that they could provide housing here in the future without those protections. We’re already seeing the signs of a serious crisis. And let me just be clear that I think that everyone would agree that no matter what you’re raised or where you live, everyone in Oregon deserves to have a safe place to live and raise their family. And so the state lawmakers need to fix this problem of the rent limits, the fast tracking that we’re seeing with the evictions and even the higher rates of homelessness and all these pressures on our communities.
Miller: Inflation has meant an increase in prices for many goods and services, but on the flip side, the job market is good right now, wages are up, many sectors are offering hiring bonuses, so what do you see as the challenges in general right now that renters are facing?
McCarty: Well, first to counter that picture: wages may be up, but for our lowest income earners or people who are on a fixed income, they’re not up by 14.6%. The largest part of anyone’s household expenses are housing followed by transportation and food. All of those costs have gone up together. Especially for low-income households, it’s it’s a very, very difficult economic picture, but even for your moderate income household a 14.6% increase on your average rent is going to be over $200 a month, cumulative, almost over $3,000 a year in an extra expense that nobody had anticipated and their wages certainly have not increased by that amount.
Miller: You said that there’s a serious crisis on the horizon right now. Have you already seen an increase in eviction notices just in the last couple of days since these particular protections lapsed?
McCarty: Yes. A really strong indicator is just in the month of August alone we saw 2,000 court eviction filings. And then just over the last year we’ve seen 119% increase. So both of those indicate that there’s a serious problem right now and growing.
Miller: And so for those that were filed in August, those would have been people who didn’t qualify for whatever reason under the safe harbor protections?
McCarty: Yes.
Miller: Are you also seeing an increase now in people who maybe did qualify, but with those protections going away now they’re getting the letters?
McCarty: Yes, and understandably that would be the case. I don’t have the numbers yet on precisely how many are related to the loss of the safe harbor period. But I can tell you, the Community Alliance of Tenants is an organization that has been around for 25 years. We are membership based. We receive hundreds of calls each month, thousands of interactions every year and people this month are telling us that that 14.6% increase–if they got a notice this month–is essentially an eviction notice for them because they know that they won’t be able to pay that in January. Or if they had applied for a safe harbor period and they still haven’t received that help, they know that they’re going to get an eviction notice and it’s especially unfair because we know that there are still thousands of households that were eligible for rent assistance that they needed, may even still be waiting, and they are at risk of eviction this month.
Miller: That waiting period is something that we heard about months and months ago. And there was a question, how long is it going to take a long time to process these applications? You’re saying it is still taking a long time?
McCarty: I’m saying that there are some individuals that have called into our hotline that are still waiting or are still expressing to us that they’re having problems getting access to that resource. And frankly, the resource from the federal government has not been renewed and has mostly been already accounted for and in the process of distribution of those funds.
Miller: At this point when you think about going forward and tenant protections or rental assistance going forward, do you envision these as a continuation of some version of temporary emergency responses to the pandemic, the ongoing effects of the pandemic? Or do you see the kinds of help that you’re calling for as permanent help going forward?
McCarty: I think we need both. There will always be a need for emergency assistance – job loss, illness, pandemic, economic downturn. And as a community, we need to be prepared for that and we need to keep the systems that we’ve created over the last couple of years ready for those moments and ready with some kind of funding. Then there’s also a need for long term rent assistance for your elders, people with a disability, people who are not going to be part of the job market and for other reasons. And so we equally need a system like that in place. Of course there are Section 8 and other types of federal assistance, but we know it is not enough and we need a better system going forward.
Miller: As I’m sure you’ve heard, landlords point out that they still have to make mortgage payments and pay for property taxes and sometimes pay for necessary maintenance expenses that they say don’t go away, even if rent isn’t coming in. In other words, they say that we are on the hook, too, and we could be suffering if people can’t pay us the rent that we need just to not go into foreclosure ourselves. How do you respond broadly to those arguments?
McCarty: Well, broadly the comparisons are not the same. A household that’s evicted is at risk of so many negatives in their life–health issues, education issues–versus one of your larger landlords where they might experience some delays. It’s very unlikely and truthfully in what we’ve seen bear out is in this particular market that landlords did not suffer. In fact, the market for owners has been quite good, equity has increased, and so we don’t see the evidence of our rental owners being in danger when these protections are put in place to keep stability in our communities.
Miller: There’s another way to look at, less of an adversarial way and more of a kind of uneasy partnership, because for the most part, my understanding is that landlords, they do have a financial interest in just holding on to tenants and having that stability and having those checks coming in month after month. Where do you see areas for common ground with landlords?
McCarty: Yes. I think many of the protections that were put in place during the public health emergency were that kind of common ground. They were sensible eviction protections that prevented a needless eviction for a small amount of money, which, frankly, for a landlord turning over their apartment, is an increased cost and there’s also the legal costs. So I think both from the tenant perspective and the landlord perspective, slowing down the process, giving people a chance to get the resources and the help and then paying their rent is the sensible solution. I think that’s the common ground and I think we’ve been in that common ground for a while, but with the loss of the safe harbor period and returning to a 72-hour notice period, a lot of those protections that we created together are not available to us.
Miller: Kim McCarty, thanks very much for starting us off today. Thank you. For another perspective on this, we’re joined now by Jason Miller. He is the legislative director for the Oregon Rental Housing Association. Jason Miller, welcome.
J. Miller: Good afternoon, Dave.
Miller: What have you seen since Senate Bill 891, these safe harbor protections, lapsed?
J. Miller: Since the safe harbor protections last laps, which has only been a few days, there have been some evictions that have happened there. And really a lot of those evictions are due to the process being broken for their rental assistance. A tenant waiting six to seven months to find out that they have been denied for rental assistance really shouldn’t happen in this day and age.
Miller: That is part of the delay that we’re just hearing about from Kim McCarty. You’re saying that even just a denial could take more than half a year?
J. Miller: Correct. Yes. I work in the business. I am day to day in the trenches and I have seen examples and I’ve talked to other landlords that have seen examples of where it’s six to seven months to just find out about the denial and then you have a tenant who all of a sudden has to come up with $10,000 to $12,000 to stay in their rental home. At this point, you obviously got to feel bad for that tenant, but then you’ve just also got a housing provider that just got told this rental assistance that they were waiting for is no longer going to be there, that you have to go through another process to possibly recover that rental assistance. And that process doesn’t always make the landlord whole as well, either. We’re talking about the landlord guarantee fund.
Miller: As we heard from Kim McCarty, she did see this system, despite its delays, as overall being a good thing and a kind of compromise or partnership between landlords and tenants, some way to make both sides at least close to whole. I get it she’d like to see a version of a continuation of this program. Is there a tweaked version of this program that you would support?
J. Miller: Yes, most definitely, Dave. I do agree that there were some successes from this program. It was a temporary fix for a very unique situation. We had a massive number of people who were unable to work. But now we’re back to normal unemployment levels and we no longer need the extremes. We no longer need to slow the process down in order to process rental assistance. Every landlord is going to agree that rental assistance is great. When a tenant has an emergency situation, when they realize they are not able to pay rent, a landlord does not want the tenant to have to move. The landlord does have the interest of having the tenants have rental assistance.
Just to kind of give you a little timeline, the rents are generally due on the first of the month. A landlord cannot send out any eviction notice until the eighth of the month. And that eviction notice, yes, it is reverted back to 72 hours, but the majority of landlords, they do mail it, which adds another three to four days for mailing time onto that, which essentially gives a tenant who, on the first knows that they are unable to pay rent, there’s two weeks to apply to get approved or denied for rental assistance. And in a day where you can get approved for car loans or other types of assistance within hours, I’m pretty sure that OHCS and the Oregon legislature can come up with the process to fast track those approvals or denials and no longer have a tenant have to wait six or seven months to find out that they’re not going to get assistance; but instead get the tenants should get that message in one to two weeks that they’re going to need to find another way to get assistance or that their assistance had been approved and they’re going to be safe from eviction. Can you imagine waiting six to seven months not knowing if you’re going to be evicted? That seems a little extreme.
Miller: Do you have a good sense for why the process does take so long given that other kinds of financial assistance, as you noted, seem to be handled much quicker?
J. Miller: I think part of the process was thought up on the fly. It was something that OHCS, the legislature, landlords and tenants never had time to prepare for. All of a sudden, it was a problem that we’re facing right away. I believe everybody did their best to make things work as best as they could. There were a lot of successes. There are a lot of tenants in the business I work for that applied and we received rental assistance within a week. Then there were a handful of attendees that we didn’t hear anything from for months. There was some problem because some of the work was outsourced to another company in another state and that kind of received the disconnect. If we’re going to have a permanent rental assistance program, I think it all needs to be based in Oregon, not only because of the continuity of having everybody here, but wouldn’t it be better for Oregon to have Oregon people put to work to process that rental assistance instead of supporting some employees in another state?
Miller: But do you see an appetite among Oregon lawmakers? Let’s say that there is no huge new pot of federal money for this rental assistance, do you think lawmakers in Salem are going to create their own?
J. Miller: I think that can happen and I’m sure Kim will agree with me on this as well, too. I think this is one thing we can all get behind, Republican, Democrat, tenant, landlord. I think we can all get behind that there needs to be rental assistance and I think we can all get behind to the fact that we need to speed up this process because we don’t want everybody sitting in limbo, we don’t want a tenant to have sleepless nights for months because they don’t know if they’re going to be evicted. We want to get it processed quickly and I think everybody can get behind that no matter what your political affiliation or what side of the spectrum will fall on. I think that the goal for this new session is to get a permanent fast rental assistance program put into place and then also have it so it can ramp up in case of a natural disaster or another pandemic. It can ramp up from normal speed to a great need
Miller: Just briefly, I want to give you a chance to respond to one of the last things that Kim McCarty said that overall landlords, building owners, have actually done pretty well over the last two and a half years. What’s your response?
J. Miller: It depends on your landlord. The small business housing providers, they’re the ones that are the greatest risk. They are your local auto mechanic, your nurse, your school teacher who instead of putting their money in a 401K or in the stock market or in bonds, they decided they were going to save for a down payment on the house to make into a rental home. These are the ones that had the mortgage that they had to pay for out of their food budget. These are the ones that had to replace a broken stove in a rental unit without having any rents coming in to pay for it, and they had to put it on their credit card. Those housing providers are the ones that really are kind of the backbone of Oregon.
Miller: When you say that, what’s the ballpark percentage of rental housing units that are owned by those small scale landlords?
J.Miller: It depends on what type of unit you’re talking about, and I don’t have the exact percentages, but if you’re talking about family housing, three bedroom, two bath homes, duplexes, larger housing where you have a backyard, a garage and you’re able to have a more family-type house, the majority are owned by these types of landlords, the small business landlords.
Miller: And the percentages go down if you include apartment buildings as well?
J. Miller: The apartment buildings, most of those just because of the pure dollar amount it takes to construct an apartment building or buy an apartment building, are going to be owned by bigger corporations. Yet some of those corporations are still Oregon-based and they are family corporations. Granted they can maybe be better than somebody who just owns one house and that that’s their sole investment. But the Oregon Rental Housing Association did a survey of our members and since the pandemic started, 7% of our members have either sold their rental property or converted it to another use. Well, that’s not a huge number, I think everybody would agree in this tight housing market that we have right now, we can’t even lose one home because there’s not enough properties for the people looking for properties at this moment.
Miller: Jason Miller, thanks very much for joining us.
J. Miller:Thank you.
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