ITHACA, N.Y.—With New York State’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) having stopped accepting applications in January, tenant advocates are predicting an uptick in evictions.
ERAP was designed to provide emergency assistance to renters and landlords who were financially impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. While it began with a disorganized rollout, the ERAP program would come to define the dynamics in eviction court after its inception in June 2021.
Advocates aren’t concerned with eviction cases increasing in number. Moreso, it’s the results of those cases, said Simone Gatson, a housing specialist with the Human Services Coalition of Tompkins County.
“I think that while eviction filings might stay the same or increase, I think the outcomes of those evictions are really going to be impacted because of the loss of ERAP,” said Gatson.
The uncertainty ahead is what Keith McCaffery, Managing Attorney at Legal Assistance of Western New York (LawNY), is considering as the City of Ithaca’s Common Council comes closer to voting to renew its Right to Counsel program. Through the program, the city of Ithaca pays LawNY to represent city residents that are facing eviction and have an income that is at or below 200% of the poverty line or, for example, $29,160 for a single individual.
ERAP no longer accepting applications takes a valuable tool off the table, says McCafferty. Tenants that were unable to pay their rent were able to gain protection from being evicted after they applied for ERAP, while New York state determined whether to compensate their landlords for missed months of rent. The protection extended past New York’s eviction moratorium, which ended in January 2022.
Josh Adams, a landlord in Ithaca who says he rents 12 units across five buildings, said that the ERAP program was useful and helped alleviate some of the uncertainty that he faced as a business owner. “The eviction moratorium that went into place was, for a lot of us, really difficult financially. I’m a small businessman. I’m just a regular person, like anyone, and so I found ERAP to be very good.”
As of March 17, New York state is reporting that 592 payments have been issued to Tompkins County landlords, each for a different household, coming to a total of over $4 million in assistance.
“The bugaboo with landlording is that sometimes people don’t pay their rent, and it got really bad during COVID,” said Adams. While ERAP offered an opportunity to resolve a non-payment issue during part of the height of the COVID-19 crisis and until January 2023, Adams said the disappearance of that program means the process of resolving those conflicts is going to go back to the courts, a system which he said he feels favor tenants.
But The knock-on consequences for a tenant that experiences an eviction — especially one with low to moderate means — may translate into financial instability felt for years down the road, or even homelessness. When it comes to assisting a tenant of few means in the court system, McCafferty said, “The time to sort of scramble around and try to find resources to solve the problem is much more condensed [now], and then the resources available are fewer and further between.”
Eviction filings have not seemed to reach pre-pandemic levels yet locally. Cornell University’s Industrial Labor Relations (ILR) Buffalo Co-Lab released the Evictions Filings Dashboard last week. The dashboard can show how many evictions have been filed within a zip code or county. While the number of eviction filings are shown, the results and the groups that are impacted the most are not.
The dashboard shows that Tompkins County had one of the lowest rates of filings issued per renter occupied household in 2022. Last year’s number of eviction filings also did not reach pre-pandemic levels in the 14850 zip code, an area that encompasses the City and Town of Ithaca as well as parts of other towns in the county.
In 2022, there were 152 eviction filings in the 14850 zip code, compared to 178 in 2019. While the number of eviction filings are shown, the results and the groups that are impacted the most are not.
If there is a silver lining to point towards as advocates ready for a change in the way eviction cases play out, it’s that there were fewer cases than LawNY expected in 2022. The city set aside $125,000 to fund its Right to Counsel program. As of the end of December, McCaffery said that LawNY has only billed the City of Ithaca for $8,554.85.
The reasons behind that seemingly low figure, McCafferty explained, is in part due to the lower number of cases than expected, as well as other funding sources supporting the Right to Counsel program. The city’s support has allowed LawNY to represent 39 cases from March 2022, when the program first began, to the end of December 2022, McCaffery said.
“We have a lot leftover going forward,” said McCafferty. “And we’re nervous that we may see this uptick in people who don’t have resources available to help them solve the problem” of facing an eviction “and are going to need a lawyer to try to help them get it solved.”