Florissant resident Dorothy Gayden first fell behind on her rent earlier this year in January. Her husband, a rideshare driver, saw his ride requests decrease and disappear throughout the pandemic. Gayden herself is 64 and immunocompromised, so she is not working at all at this time.
Over the past eight months, Gayden said she has filed for rental assistance four or five times to no avail.
The rental aid application process, however, requires participation from both landlord and tenant, each party filling out forms — and Gayden’s landlord, she said, didn’t fill out his end of the forms until mid-August, when he began responding to her emails.
But by then, Gayden was $14,000 behind on rent already. And though she hasn’t been evicted, she worries that it could happen at any moment, especially since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s nationwide eviction moratorium was overturned by the U.S.Supreme Court on Aug. 26.
“It’s just frightening because we will never be able to pay that kind of money,” Gayden said.
The eviction moratorium, according to County Director of Health and Human Services Yusef Scoggin, was giving many residents the time they needed to work with their landlords and social services organizations to access rental aid money and avoid eviction altogether. Scoggin said the agency is apprehensive now that the moratorium has been lifted.
“Our concern is about what the floodgates look like potentially, as the Supreme Court decision starts to make ripples throughout our community,” Scoggin said.
Since March 2020, Scoggin said about 3,000 eviction cases have been filed in St. Louis County courts. That’s significantly fewer than would be filed in an ordinary year, in which approximately 1,000 cases are filed every month.
He now worries that those cases will skyrocket and that residents won’t be able to get the aid money they need to avoid eviction in time. As of Aug. 30 St. Louis County has distributed 34.5% of the federal funding allocated to them for rental assistance, money which was received by the county in April. The vast majority of the rental assistance applications the county has received have been in the predominantly-Black areas of North County.
In the city, about $2.1 million out of the $9 million in aid received had been disseminated through the end of July, or about 23% of St. Louis’ available aid. More recent data was not available. The city has for weeks provided walk-in rental assistance clinics, which by Aug. 27 had served 200 clients.
Melissa Pashia with the Equal Housing Opportunity Council said that Gayden is not alone in her inability to access aid, either because of an uncooperative landlord or a slow processing system with the county.
“A lot of my clients have returned to work, but they don’t have the means of paying up 12 months of rental arrears to get themselves current,” Pashia said.
Now, those clients wonder whether they have run out of time to get the aid needed to avoid eviction, since protections have been lifted.
Pashia said she has clients that applied for aid on April 5, the first day that ERAP funding was available.“And they’re still pending.”
She noted that Scoggin had said a few weeks ago that they were speeding up the process, but the council has yet to see results, which Pashia said is frustrating. On Wednesday, Scroggin said that more recently-filed applications are likely to see quicker results, with rental assistance applications filed in the last 30 days getting a turnaround time of about 12 days.
Both Pashia and Paula Carey-Moore of the Urban League, who is working with city clients on rental assistance efforts, said they recognize that both tenants and landlords are frustrated. Carey-Moore said some landlords, like some tenants, “aren’t tech savvy” and find their end of the rental aid application challenging.
“So we are proactive in trying to reach out to these landlords that we have on our case files, whether or not they file for an eviction,” Carey-Moore said.
Missouri has been one of the slowest states to distribute the federal coronavirus emergency rental aid funding, according to Pashia. Across the United States, only 10% of federal rental assistance money had gone out to renters by the end of July, according to CBS News. In the St. Louis region, those numbers are significantly higher, but many housing advocates worry that assistance still isn’t going out fast enough to stop evictions.
U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-St. Louis, fought for the eviction moratorium to be extended in early August and said she intends to continue to press for a further federal moratorium, and is in ongoing communication with Congressional leadership to determine how they can help get federal rental aid out to people in need.
“We didn’t sit on those steps just to give up now,” Bush added, referencing the several days and nights she and others spent camped out on the capitol steps campaigning for the moratorium.
“In St. Louis, 8,700 people are now at risk of losing their homes. Even under the best conditions, that notice on the door can be a death sentence,” Bush said. “In this time of unprecedented natural and man-made disasters, we cannot abandon our neighbors most in need of our help.”
In both St. Louis City and St. Louis County, lawmakers have discussed implementing local eviction moratoriums to buy more time for tenants and landlords. In Tuesday’s County Council meeting, an ordinance that would have accomplished this was not voted on, as council members raised questions about its legality. Instead, it was sent to committee.
“An eviction moratorium buys us time to get more of our federal rental assistance funds out the door,” County Executive Sam Page wrote in a Monday letter to the County Council. “While we are doing better than most parts of the country in helping those facing homelessness, the application process based on Treasury Department guidelines has made it difficult to get the funds out the door at the rapid-fire pace we would like.”
The St. Louis City Board of Aldermen is considering a similar local moratorium, but they are on summer recess for the next two weeks.
Meanwhile, according to Sheriff Vernon Betts, St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones has taken things into her own hands by calling him personally and asking him what he could do to slow down the eviction process.
“It was the mayor, called me directly and asked, ‘Can you slow it down? We have a process to get assistance in people’s hands, we just need time to get that done,’” Betts said.
As such, Betts said, he nixed his initial plan of tripling his fulltime evictions team staff from two people to six. He said the sheriff’s office will continue to carry out about 10 evictions per day rather than the planned 30, and will focus on ‘nuisance properties’ — those where an eviction has been filed because something illegal is suspected of happening, or major property damage or fighting is occuring, rather than just because a tenant couldn’t pay rent. Evictions due to COVID-related nonpayment of rent in the city, Betts said, will start in late September.
“Evictions are not something that the sheriff gets tickled about,” Betts said. “I’m not happy about putting people out.”
He said that while the eviction process can take between 10 and 30 days, by the time a sheriff’s deputy arrives to evict someone, the chance for negotiation has passed.
“When that final eviction notice comes in, the only thing we’re going to allow you to do is take your personal belongings with you or whatever you can carry in your arms,” Betts said. “We come with the landlord, and the landlord comes with a locksmith.”
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