(Credit: Images City of Glens Falls; design, Steve Thurston, 2022)
Pages from Glens Falls' flier about tenant and landlord assistance.
The City of Glens Falls has about $40,000 left of 2020 federal CARES Act funding to distribute to city renters and landlords. The money will be distributed as other similar funds had: through two local charities, the Warren-Hamilton Counties Community Action Agency and the Family Service Association of Glens Falls.
“It’s the final money that we have that has not been allocated,” Glens Falls Mayor Bill Collins said in an interview March 9.
Collins said that the distribution through the service agencies is the most efficient and cost effective for the city. Distributing the funds under the rules set-up by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development requires trained staff and standard operating procedures to properly handle applications.
“We have these services, these not-for-profits, in our city that have systems set up to distribute this money better than we [the city] do,” the mayor said.
The announcement of the money is the latest step the city has taken to alert people of the money available. It is available for city residents only.
In January, Ward 3 Councilor Diana Palmer reported to the Glens Falls Common Council that the buildings and codes committee was working on a central location for rental assistance information.
[Read our earlier coverage here.]
As part of that, the city has created a two-page flier that highlights local, state and federal financial resources; summarizes laws for landlords and tenants; and offers best practices for landlords who are dealing with delinquent renters.
On the flier, the city is asking landlords to have patience and to work directly with individual tenants to avoid eviction. The flier asks landlords to consider a repayment plan or forgiveness of some back rent. The flier also asks the landlord to act as a resource, to offer information, for their tenants.
“We’ve had landlords come to us with frustration before," back when landlords could not evict tenants, the mayor said. Over the past two years, under New York State’s pandemic-related PAUSE restrictions, landlords could not evict tenants.
Although tenants could not be evicted, they also could not be forced to pursue subsidies. Many chose not to get help or just did not know where to turn for help, both Collins and Palmer said. As well, some tenants did not know how to apply.
“We didn’t know the landlords were struggling, hoping the tenants would access this money,” Collins said.
Therefore, in January 2022, months after receiving the original allotment of $165,000, the Community Action Agency still had about $100,000 in rental assistance on hand.
The moratorium lifted on January 15.
"We spent like $20,000 real quick" in February, specifically on rent assistance or emergency housing, said Lynn Ackershoek, the Executive Director of the Warren-Hamilton Community Action Agency. Before February, they had spent about $5,000 per month of the original allotment.
Because of the rise in need, her board of directors moved the maximum amount one household can receive from $2,500 to $6,000 or six months of rent. She said one family thus far has gotten just under the new limit. A one-bedroom apartment can run about $1,000 per month she said. They have now spent about $100,000 of the original allocation.
By comparison, pre-pandemic, housing assistance only made up about $10,000 of Community Action’s annual budget, but Ackershoek said that was partly because the system that is now in place had not been there pre-pandemic.