Over the course of the pandemic, Dane County received substantial amounts of financial assistance targeted towards renters impacted by COVID-19 and the financial hardship that ensued. These funds provided many renters a much needed reprieve during a time of economic struggle. However, in addition to their tangible benefits for tenants and landlords, these funds also provided opportunities to evaluate methods of providing large scale emergency rental assistance here in Dane County.
Dane County CARES Program
For Dane County, emergency federal relief from COVID-19 for renters came in two major waves: 1) the CARES act which funded the Dane CARES program, and 2) Emergency Rental Assistance (“ERA”) which funded Dane CORE. Dane CARES operated in the summer of 2020 and focused on providing roughly three months of assistance to households. Dane CARES provided nearly $10,000,000 in assistance in a relatively short span of time, but prepared the community for the substantially larger ERA-funded programs that would follow.
This program faced significant logistical hurdles that required creative problem-solving. First, the program required paperwork be completed by both tenants and landlords at a time when in-person interactions were still incredibly difficult at the beginning of the pandemic. In addressing these issues, Dane County took a balanced approach between creating electronic systems for completing the application and a variety of methods for tenants and landlords to complete the application on paper using drop boxes and in-person sites.
These solutions relied heavily on various public awareness campaigns and partnerships with other organizations in the community. Outreach efforts remained a struggle throughout the pandemic, but during the CARES program, the community relied heavily on outdoor events, use of public library spaces (once the libraries re-opened), and a variety of neighborhood-based efforts. However, these challenges led to the use of community partnerships between organizations to reach tenants and landlords. This effort demonstrated the benefit of such partnerships, which have continued to this day within emergency rental assistance programs.
A second challenge also stemmed from the documentation requirements of the funding. To receive assistance, tenants needed their landlord to complete a certification to identify the amount of their monthly rent, the individual months that were back owed, and the total balance as of the certification date. While these requirements are significantly reduced compared the other programs, this still required tenants and landlords to collaborate in the application process at a time when tensions were high. However, the bigger challenge proved to be the paperwork and certifications themselves. At the time, many landlords were not prepared with systems for accurately tracking and reporting balances owed by tenants. While many utilized systems that would’ve allowed for such functions prior to the pandemic, the abrupt switch to remote work paired with the influx of back-owed rents made accuracy a challenge.
As a result, the program spent a considerable amount of time following up with tenants and landlords to address contradictory or confusing certifications provided by landlords. This included challenges with ownership details, conflicts between the number of months owed and the total balance, and contradictory balances when compared to monthly rent amounts. In the end, this demonstrated the importance for gathering paperwork from applicants, including copies of the rental agreement, detailed rent ledgers, and other supporting documents to ensure balances paid were accurate and allowable.
The third major challenge came from the community’s lack of preparedness for such a challenge. While the Tenant Resource Center was able to quickly develop systems for processing applications for assistance, this effort was significantly hampered by the need for organizations and partners to quickly hire, train, and supervise new staff while also developing new systems to process assistance. The pandemic once again demonstrated that community organizations and nonprofits are the cornerstone of our community’s emergency response. As a result, our community’s ability to respond to a crisis is directly tied to the amount of investment and support these organizations receive outside of times of crisis. In a coming article, we’ll examine the lessons learned from the ERA-funded programs that followed Dane County CARES in early 2021.