By Heather Warlick, Oklahoma Watch
Sheniqua Johnson is part of the Sandwich Generation, caring for her 14-year-old daughter and 72-year-old mother. The family of three has lived at Heritage Point Apartments in Oklahoma City for six years.
In July, Johnson couldn’t pay her $1,114 rent.
Five months earlier, Johnson, 41, was fired from her management job at a Subway restaurant on her fourth employment anniversary.
Compounding Johnson’s stressful situation, her mom’s health was fading, requiring 24-hour health care.
“The only thing that was going through my mind, I just thought that we were going to get put out,” Johnson said. “We were going to be on street side.”
Johnson needed rental assistance or she would likely be evicted. Oklahoma landlords file about 4,000 eviction cases monthly in small claims courts. According to Legal Services Corporation’s Eviction Tracker, 32,108 evictions were filed in Oklahoma between January and August.
More than $400 million of pandemic-era federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program finally ran dry for Oklahomans in September, signaling a new era of scarcity for tenants behind on rent and for landlords who extended grace periods.
The end of ERAP funding might also signal an uptick in eviction filings and homelessness in Oklahoma.
Oklahoma tenants seeking rental assistance still have a few options. Community Action Center and Neighborhood Services Organization in Oklahoma City, and Restore Hope Ministries in Tulsa assist Oklahomans like Johnson, who face losing their homes over one month’s rent.
In a stroke of what Johnson considers God’s grace, she secured a job as a home health assistant, with her mother as her first client.
Johnson also felt grace, she said, when Community Action Center approved her application for rental assistance, paying her late rent and helping Johnson back on track financially.
“That’s God, showing me he’s working,” Johnson said.
Covid Relief Deterred Evictions
Beginning in March 2021, Oklahoma City deployed $330 million and Tulsa, $70 million in ERAP funding, a set of U.S. Treasury allocations totaling $46 billion nationally. The money was earmarked to support housing stability for eligible renters throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The funds were disbursed through Community Cares Partners in Oklahoma City and Restore Hope Ministries in Tulsa.
Though several groups still offer limited resources for rental assistance, granted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and local donors, advocates agree that the dearth of rent assistance availability following ERAP leaves Oklahoma renters and landlords without a safety net. The end of a period that included an eviction moratorium and rental assistance up 15 months of back rent could lead to a rise in housing instability among Oklahoma’s low-income renters.
“Now that there aren’t significant federal funds, what’s next?” said Jeff Jaynes, executive director of Restore Hope, the state’s best-funded source of rental assistance. “There’s a certain high level of need consistently in our state.”
Before the pandemic, the biggest year Restore Hope experienced was helping 471 households with rent assistance totaling $305,000, Jaynes said.
“At the height of the pandemic, we were distributing about a million and a half dollars every week,” Jaynes said.
Oklahoma has the 46th highest housing wage in the country, with 518,633 renter households, 127,817 of which earn less than 30% of the area’s median income. Oklahoma households must earn at least $19.91 per hour to afford a typical two-bedroom unit.
The Oklahoma Legislature has not raised the minimum wage since 2009; it stands at the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour.
As wages stagnate and rental costs soar, Oklahomans struggle to pay rent, Jaynes said.
The top reasons Jaynes said people request rent assistance at Restore Hope include wages that don’t cover expenses, family health problems and transportation issues.
“Earlier this year, as we’ve started to ramp down (from ERAP spending), we were spending about $200,000 a week,” Jaynes said. “Last month we got down to about $100,000 a week. Where we need to be with our funding going forward is about $100,000 a month.”
Landlords Benefitted From ERAP
Tulsa landlord Cindy Steward said the end of federal rent assistance might add to the discouragement landlords experience when tenants fail to pay rent and could result in landlords deciding to ditch the property ladder in favor of less risky investments.
Steward manages 160 properties through her Tulsa company, Blue Mountain Properties, and said she nearly lost everything during the pandemic. She has always been sympathetic to the plights of her tenants, and when they fell behind on rent during the pandemic, she said she helped them apply for rental assistance at Restore Hope. That was her best bet for ensuring she could cover her mortgage payments.
ERAP funds kept Steward from losing her life savings during a time she described as chaotic and heartbreaking. Now that the federal assistance has ended, Steward sees a problem with tenants thinking they can skip rent when they are sick or lose their income because they think the pandemic safety nets are still in place.
Some tenants received as much as 15 months’ rent assistance with ERAP.
“Everything changed during COVID,” Steward said. “And so the attitude I get now oftentimes is, well, ‘I’m sick, so I’m not going to pay.’ That’s it.”
Steward still points her tenants to Restore Hope Ministries when they need help with rent, though the assistance is much more limited than in the recent past.
Assistance for Some, Not Enough For All
Landlords can’t afford to help people like they did when ERAP money was flowing, and once a tenant gets behind on two or more months’ rent, Steward said, they have very little chance of catching up.
Steward said her tenants often don’t realize how limited the affordable housing rental market is.
“They don’t understand it,” Steward said. “They don’t hear it.”
Neighborhood Services Organization’s rental assistance program opens its phone lines on Monday mornings every week. CEO Stacey Ninness said that the group accepts between 15 and 20 applications for assistance and closes its phone lines within about 30 minutes of opening them. Each week, as many as 150 Oklahomans apply for assistance.
Community Action Center came through for Johnson when she needed help, but she may have been less fortunate if she had waited a month.
This year, the group has spent the $70,000 it receives from FEMA and community service block grants to help 54 families, including Johnson’s. The funding ran out in August.
“The calls and the Contact Us requests don’t stop,” Thompson said. “Funding stops. But the need doesn’t stop.”
ERAP funding was a stop-gap for Oklahoma tenants and landlords during the pandemic years, but now that funding has reverted to philanthropy and relatively small FEMA grants, time will tell if evictions spike as a result, Thompson said.
Ginny Bass Carl, executive director of CCP, estimated the group assisted 85,000 Oklahomans with rent.
Now, CCP has turned its attention to distributing $8 million in Treasury funds geared toward Oklahoma entities building or refurbishing affordable housing, Carl said.
“It’s like the Treasury finally recognized that a big factor in the problem is lack of inventory of affordable, accessible, safe housing,” Carl said.
Despite its benefits to landlords and renters, Carl said ERAP was problematic in certain areas: It paid for too many months of rent and was chaotic to disburse.
“What we learned is that people definitely needed monetary help with their rent, without a doubt, but they also need to know that there are enough apartments or houses that are affordable, and that’s not always the case,” Carl said.
Carl said that rental assistance is important for bridging the gap between being late on rent and becoming homeless. But it’s part of a multi-pronged approach to alleviating housing insecurity, including increasing the state’s affordable housing inventory.
“Money, in and of itself, is not the answer,” Carl said. “But the answer needs money.”
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
