The pandemic-era Oregon Emergency Rental Assistance Program, or OERAP, prevented nearly 70,000 renters from being evicted, according to the state, yet tenants, lawyers and nonprofit workers say the program was a failure in many ways.
When the program launched May 2021, users reported glitches on the website and errant notifications. The application was difficult to navigate and had accessibility issues. Further, many tenants had to wait months for assistance while others received delayed notifications their landlord received the funds. In some instances, landlords cashed the assistance but still tried to evict their tenants, according to the Oregon Law Center and Community Alliance of Tenants.
“(OERAP) fell very short of reaching the most impacted tenants,” Jensi Albright, then-membership manager of the Community Alliance of Tenants, said.
Oregon wrapped up the vital rental assistance program in August 2022, but the rent emergency continues for many tenants. According to the Oregon Law Center, pandemic-era fears of an eviction wave were realized as eviction filings nearly doubled in the months immediately after OERAP funds dried up and eviction moratoriums concluded.
As state leaders consider how to address the rental crisis, they have a lot to learn from the program’s failures, experts who helped renters navigate the system say.
“There are so many things we learned that didn't work,” Albright said. “If we're not addressing those issues now, then we really failed in our process through OERAP.”
Roll out issues
OERAP’s system immediately exhibited significant issues after the application portal opened May 19, 2021. Over 26,000 people applied for assistance in the first couple of months, and the system, Allita 360, quickly developed an unmanageable backlog. Multnomah County was among the slowest counties in the state processing and paying out applications — it had yet to pay out a dime in assistance, and hadn't even viewed the majority of applications, Street Roots reported in August 2021.
After Street Roots reported on the lack of movement in Multnomah County months after applications opened, the county pointed to the state and the unreliable application software, while the state pointed the finger at the county and the software. Ultimately, the state stepped in and assisted the county in processing and paying out claims.
Regardless of which government entity was ultimately responsible for the delayed processing and payouts, the consensus among the state, county, landlords, tenants and advocates was the software — purchased via an independent contractor — was at least partly responsible. The state paid $395,482 to software vendor Allita 360 to implement the centralized application system for the federally funded $280 million OERAP.
Denis Theriault, Multnomah County deputy communications coordinator, said state officials mandated the new system hoping it would streamline the application process by funneling tenants to a single application portal rather than requiring them to seek aid through nonprofits and community agencies across the state.
However, Allita 360 was known for having issues. Theriault pointed out other states, like Rhode Island, tried the system but chose not to keep it due to technical bugs.
The technical issues in the system, combined with insufficient staffing, led to massive delays in rental assistance disbursement. Glitches in Allita 360 included payment process functions not working, the communication system failing to send out notifications to tenants or sending out errant messages. The needed fixes and upgrades occasionally required staff to redo work.
In one case, glitches resulted in nearly 300 applications failing to upload to Home Forward, Multnomah County’s public housing authority, where staff rechecked applications that had moved into approved payment status before disbursing money to landlords.
With the delays and glitches came a ticking clock for tenants facing potential evictions for unpaid rent. The state’s eviction moratorium, in place in different iterations beginning April 2020, expired September 2022, but renters received 90 days of protection if they applied for OERAP or other rental assistance and submitted documentation to their landlords.
By late August 2021, the county only paid out assistance to 160 of the over 14,000 households who applied, and officials said some Multnomah County applications for OERAP would not be reviewed until March 2022 — long after county, state and federal eviction protections were set to expire at the time.
Albright said many applicants were unsure if they would be evicted or if the application would be approved at all.
“In the time between OERAP closing and now, in the very first month, I spent a lot of time on the phone with tenants who were just stuck and not knowing,” Albright said earlier this year.
While Multnomah County was among the slowest in the state to distribute funds, Oregon lagged well behind its neighbors almost without exception. Clark County, Washington, a county with almost half the population of Multnomah County and a fraction of the funding and local community organizations, distributed more rental assistance than the entire state of Oregon by that time.
Inaccessibility
Glitches and delays aside, Albright said the application process was also inaccessible.
“The process of OERAP was onerous,” she said.
The application was difficult to navigate for English speakers and those with technology, let alone those who don’t speak English and couldn’t access a laptop or other device to complete the application, Albright said.
“Even though there was a translation into different languages, it wasn't accessible enough,” she said.
The system relied heavily on landlords to understand the process, communicate with tenants, and, crucially, accept the rental assistance. But that didn’t always happen.
“I was sometimes asked to be in communication with landlords to basically assure them that their tenants were acting in good faith and just to let them know that I was working with them as sort of an added protection,” Albright said.
She said she noticed a shift where landlords didn’t want to wait for the money. Delays in updates on application statuses from OERAP or in the money being paid out resulted in landlords prematurely posting evictions.
Despite it being illegal for landlords to refuse rent, Albright said some still refused to accept tenants’ funds because they knew they could evict and increase the cost of rent for the unit. Many tenants are victims of this tactic because they don’t know it’s illegal.
Donovan Scribes, then-CAT communication manager, said the state and lawmakers often rely on the “good faith of landlords” to not wrongfully to evict tenants.
“You'll hear a lot of lawmakers kind of speak about ‘housing providers’… ‘Why would they want to evict people? It's not in the landlord's favor to evict people,’” Scribes said earlier this year. “But because of the way the rent cap is structured, actually, there's a lot of incentive for landlords to get people out.”
Albright said OERAP’s reliance on landlords to behave honorably left room for them to abuse the system.
“I saw some things that were really disturbing around the communications with landlords and rent increases and then how the money was being applied,” Albright said.
Good faith of landlords
While it doesn’t have exact numbers, the Oregon Law Center said it helped clients whose landlords misapplied OERAP funding and posted evictions for tenants even after the landlords received and cashed the assistance.
“There are some examples of cases where landlords misapplied funding that they received from OERAP either to different parts of the ledger or various discrepancies that led to eviction processes anyway for the various months that OERAP had paid for,” Becky Straus, managing attorney for the center’s Eviction Defense Project, said.
In those instances where she or an OERAP official was aware of the misapplied funds, Straus says the eviction was corrected.
“Of course, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of examples of people who didn't get help to work through those issues,” she said.
OHCS didn’t deny that it was aware of instances where landlords misapplied funds, but it said it wasn’t aware of any successful evictions as a result.
“We do not know of any cases where landlord misuse of OERAP funds resulted in an eviction for the tenant,” Delia Hernández, a public information officer for Oregon Housing & Community Services, said.
Peggy Samolinski, Multnomah County Youth and Family Services Division director, told Street Roots she is unaware of any instances where landlords received OERAP funds but still attempted to evict the tenant. However, she cautioned there “could be unreported cases.”
Samolinski added landlords were required to sign a form stating they would not evict a tenant for any of the time the rent assistance covered — another instance of relying on the good faith of the landlord.
Unreachable
Despite OERAP closing in August 2022, some tenants received notifications well after the state disbursed all payments.
One tenant, Luna Mitsch, received a notification from the program in September, letting them know their application status had been updated to “payment in progress.”
According to Hernández, “payment in progress” means the state has sent the rental assistance to the landlord, but they haven’t cashed the funds yet.
Mitsch, who had an eviction notice and had previously received OERAP funds, was relieved to know the state had paid their landlord. However, when Mitsch spoke with their landlord, they said they weren’t aware of any new state funds.
According to Ryan Yambra, a communications coordinator for Multnomah County, the OERAP notification had likely been a glitch. Records showed the state had already paid out Mitsch’s only approved OERAP applications to their landlord. No further funds were coming their way.
“Because of OERAP being so slow and there being so many issues with it and them not being very proactive with communicating with landlords … it's unfair to tenants because now we're at risk,” Mitsch said.
Though Hernández said the state paid out all OERAP funds, OHCS had records of six applications still with payment pending statuses as of January.
The outstanding applications indicate there may have been more tenants in Oregon, like Mitsch, in eviction limbo, waiting for assistance that will never come.
Hernández said these could be instances where the landlords still have not cashed the assistance.
However, the county and state no longer have control over the program.
After the initial round in 2021, OHCS gave the OERAP contract to Public Partnerships, LLC, a multi-state public consulting group, Hernández said.
Yambra and Hernández suggested Street Roots contact Public Partnerships directly for questions concerning ongoing notifications from OERAP.
Street Roots could not reach Public Partnerships’ press team and calls to the OERAP line, resulted in a message stating, “Tenants and landlords should not be waiting for outstanding OERAP funding. The temporary emergency assistance program closed in August, and all applicants received an email informing them of their payment status. Tenants whose applications were deemed ineligible or denied can contact Public Partnerships’ Reconsideration team.”
Contacting the “reconsideration team” leads to a pre-recorded voicemail explaining that the program is closed and directing people to contact 211 with questions.
Hernández said she was also unable to reach any contacts at Public Partnerships.
The crisis isn’t over
The state may have declared the emergency over, but for many tenants, the crisis of being unable to pay rent continues at higher than pre-pandemic levels.
Straus said many of Oregon Law Center’s clients who received OERAP funds still have an ongoing need.
“Eviction filing numbers have spiked to higher than pre-pandemic levels,” Straus said in April. “The problem of housing instability and rent burden is not over for Oregon renters.”
After tenant advocates, including CAT, asked the state for $100 million in rental assistance to bridge the gap left by OERAP, the state senate only approved nearly half the request — $55 million.
Including other rental assistance packages, the state has allocated less than $100 million for the next two years. By comparison, OHCS says it distributed over $400 million in rental assistance for the OERAP program.
“While the level of need remains high across the state, it is undeniable that the OERAP kept hundreds of thousands of Oregonians stably housed during one of the most challenging times we have faced as a state,” Hernández said.
To address the crisis, Straus says the state needs to get serious about tackling the systemic issues impacting renters through policy protections like rent caps and further emergency assistance.
“The pandemic shed a light on things that had existed long before the pandemic, which was causing instability and wealth inequality and racial disparities overlaying all of that,” Straus said. “Having resources through OERAP was extremely important in that time, but those larger systemic problems have not gone away.”
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