As June 1st arrives, rent is due and fears continue to mount for many tenants who cannot access assistance programs, stable housing, or who fear eviction.  

Maine was already experiencing an affordable housing crisis before the COVID-19 public health emergency began. Things are much worse now, as more than 100,000 Mainers have lost jobs or income since March and are unsure of how they will continue to afford their rent.

While current supports from state and federal leaders are temporarily helping some make rent, they're not reaching many who need the help and that assistance will run out long before tenants will be out of financial straits.

As the economy gradually reopens, it is unlikely that it will return to normalcy in the near term, especially given the prominence of Maine’s restaurant and tourism industries. With thousands of potential new evictions in August, there will likely be a spike in homelessness, which would be a devastating outcome, both for those directly impacted, but also for the public health of the state.

In recognition of the need to help people maintain housing during this time, the Governor and  Maine State Housing Authority issued a special emergency rental assistance program that provided up to $500 of one-time relief for eligible tenants for the month of April or May. Acceptance of the $500 relief payment requires landlords to not evict due to non-payment of rent for that respective month. However, these terms do not prevent the landlord from requiring the balance of the rent due be paid. Nor do the terms prevent the landlord from pursuing eviction for nonpayment during other months of the stay-at-home order.  

Tenants and housing advocates hosted a public online discussion of what steps Governor Mills has taken to keep tenants in their home during the stay-at-home order, and agree more must be done to create the conditions for a successful recovery. (View or download the video here.)

For Jess Falero, the assistance program was too little too late.The stress of the pandemic and financial uncertainties led Jess to return to Florence House, a women’s shelter, where physical distancing is very difficult to maintain. “The rental assistance program was not available yet and I had to leave my previous housing situation,” Jess explained. “Homes are a guarantee that people have something to fall back on to keep their mind and body safe. Every human deserves that dignity. We need to begin shifting to a system that treats housing as a human right, and invests in the inherent worth of people over profit.” 

For some tenants, accessing the rental assistance has been challenging, resulting in long delays and denials. The emergency program launched in mid-April, and as of May 28th, the state reported that 4,965 applications have been approved for payment, 2,951 are pending, and another 2,545 have either been denied or were duplicate applications.

Rebecca Giles, a single mother in Winthrop currently living in a motel, is one of those renters who was recently denied. She was forced to find another place to live when the couple she was renting from came back from Florida in early March because of the pandemic. She applied for the emergency program but received a letter saying she was ineligible because she had not lived in her location for at least 6 months. “I am self-employed doing house cleaning work, but the pandemic caused a huge disruption to my income, and unemployment has been hard for self-employed people to access,” explained Rebecca. “I’m starting to work part-time again, but it’s not enough to get an apartment. I applied for Section 8 over two years ago, and I’m still on that wait list. I have also put applications into many subsidized apartments however have not received any responses. I did also recently begin receiving SSI for my 4 year old son who has disabilities. This helps some however right now we pay more than $1100 a month for our efficiency at the motel. With my part time job and his SSI it is very difficult to make ends meet. We need to relocate to the Waldoboro area before school starts since my son was accepted to a kindergarten program in the fall.  It has been very challenging."

Before the pandemic, there was already a shortage of 22,000 affordable homes in Maine, resulting in long wait times and only 25% of eligible households receiving the rental assistance they need. “If we had fully funded our housing assistance programs before the crisis, we would have had systems in place to respond more efficiently,” said Crystal Cron of Presente! Maine, who moderated the discussion. “Now that we have this crisis, the assistance needs to be made available immediately: no denials, no barriers. And it needs to be expanded to pay more than just partial rent for one month. We want to keep people in their homes permanently, not simply delay their eviction.”

Crystal expressed further concern that the application process has been slow, taking weeks before it is processed. In many cases, tenants don’t know whether or not it’s been approved or whether the landlord has accepted the payment. 

For tenants who have received the one-time emergency assistance, it’s proven helpful for averting immediate homelessness. But without more assistance, the future is still uncertain. That is the case for one couple in Downeast Maine,  who chose to remain anonymous, but whose story was shared by Maria Kennedy from Mano en Mano. “COVID 19 has affected me greatly. A few people were called back into work, but it’s unclear when everyone will get to work again. So I got a new  job that’s over an hour drive away which is piecework and  pays approximately $12/hr. I don’t know how we will pay the gas costs while also paying rent and other bills. It caught us at a point when we were just getting into the summer work season, we were thinking we'd be able to clear some bills but the credit card bills just keep going up. Honestly, when you ask me yeah I am concerned about becoming homeless. I have to be careful. If I pay the rent in full, then I can’t buy food in full. If I pay food in full, I can’t pay rent. It's tight. The Maine Housing assistance helped us out a lot. If there is any chance to get another rental assistance payment, that is greatly appreciated. It’s much needed.”

Advocates point to stories like these as examples where rent is being paid at the expense of other necessities that are accruing as debt. Public officials should be sensitive to this circumstance and recognize that paid rent in a pandemic is not evidence that everything is working fine. To the contrary, rental assistance is an effective way to provide overall economic relief to families, reduce the likelihood of new debt and eviction, and provide assistance to families who are being left out of federal assistance programs.

In addition to expanded assistance, advocates are also calling for the Governor to enact a full eviction moratorium that includes permanently sealing eviction records for nonpayment of rent during the pandemic, as well as minor lease violations and no-cause evictions. “There has been strong public recognition of the need to serve and protect the homeless, but we want policymakers to understand that eviction causes homelessness,” Cron explained. “We must provide eviction protections or else huge amounts of Maine people will lose their homes and it will take even more resources to provide them emergency shelter.”

Advocates began calling for comprehensive action to be taken on housing and COVID-19 beginning in March, when they submitted the Homes for All to Safely Quarantine proposal to the Governor. The full proposal is available to download at www.raiseop.com/homesforall.

Organizations Endorsing the Homes for All to Safely Quarantine Proposal: Choose Yourself, Cooperative Development Institute, Healthy Homeworks, Homeless Advocacy For All, Homeless Voices for Justice, Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, Island Housing Trust, Land In Common, Maine Democratic Socialists of America, Maine Equal Justice, Maine Immigrant Housing Coalition, Maine People's Alliance, Maine Poor People’s Campaign, Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition, Maine Prisoner Re-Entry Network, Mano en Mano, Monhegan Island Sustainable Community Association, People's Housing Coalition of Portland, Portland Buy Local, ​Presente! Maine, Raise-Op Housing Cooperative, Southern Maine Workers Center, Up With Community.