Executive Directors Message

Ron Garcia, RHA Oregon Executive Director

The late breaking news in Oregon’s rental housing industry seems to be the same news we’ve been hearing all year.

There is over $200,000,000 in aid the State of Oregon has received from the federal to be paid to landlords for all the past due rent from their tenants as a result of the eviction moratorium that was enacted in March 2020, due to the Covid 19 pandemic. Haven’t we already heard this? So, what’s new?

The answer is that the agencies in charge of paying the funds keep talking about the great efforts being made to get the money out the door. They are now sharing that over 70% of the funds have been “committed”. But the reality is that as of this writing in early October, less than 25% of the money has actually been paid to waiting property owners.

We learned that September 30th was a deadline for the states to be accountable to the US Treasury, who required that 65% of the funds needed to be used up, or else the state would be required to return the balance of unused funds back to the federal government.

This explains the creative semantics that are being offered to appease landlords who are waiting for their checks. The funds have been “committed”.

Yet we get calls daily from owners whose tenants have applied for rental assistance and who are now being told to check the status of the applications. When they do, they learn that it is “pending initial review”, “in final review”, or “submitted”. This is frustrating to say the least and many owners are beginning to holler “show me the money!”

When SB 278 was passed, it promised to calm the nerves of landlords who wanted to evict tenants for non-payment by offering a 60-day reimbursement if the tenants applied for aide. What seems to be transpiring now is that this “safe harbor” has been translated by many as a ‘safe incentive’ for tenants to NOT pay rent. The result is creating an even larger backlog of debt that they hope the government will cure with the pot of money that is still sitting there untapped.

So instead of getting closer to the finish line of this soggy mud-race, we seem to be just getting muddier and weaker the longer we keep dragging this marathon out.

Our advice to most rental property owners thus far has been to “hang in there a bit longer – relief is on the way”. Indeed, it has been emphasized by the state that this assistance was created to keep tenants housed. Therefore, evicting a tenant that owes back money is a bad risk for landlords, because they will essentially be giving up their claim for the very state reimbursement that has been promised to them.

Recent news is now breaking that some legislators want to extend the safe harbor bill even longer (essentially making a fourth extension of the eviction moratorium a possibility). The Rental Housing Alliance Oregon is on record to say that this is unacceptable. Landlords have been asked (required) to fund the government’s housing policy of deferring rent for tenants based solely on their own declaration of hardship. The government’s policies are only making it worse. If the state wants to fund tenant housing payments, they need to find the money in the budget to pay the housing providers. Private Citizens should no longer be required to be “deputized by force” to pay the bills for unfulfilled promises made by the state.

Of course, the reply is apt to be that there is no money in the state budget to pay hundreds of millions of dollars of residential rent. After all, housing is still a private industry, not a government agency, right? If that is true, then allow the market to make its corrections. We urge our legislative representatives to act responsibly and end these no-win policies that hurt the very people they are saying they help.