More COVID-19 Rental Assistance Is Here: What Do Tenants, Landlords & Communities Need? nhpr.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nhpr.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By Bob Sanders - NH Business Review
• Feb 16, 2021
Credit Shane Adams via Flickr/CC - http://ow.ly/OJ5Pe
Can New Hampshire spend $200 million in federal money to keep people in their homes when it wasn’t able to spend $20 million last year for the same purpose?
That’s the question being asked by state officials, housing activists, tenants and landlords while they wait – after the state’s Housing Relief Program ended on Dec. 18 – for the new federal Emergency Rental Assistance program to begin.
And no one really knows the answer.
“It depends on the universe of need that’s out there,” said Taylor Caswell, commissioner of the Department of Business and Economic Affairs and executive director of the Governor’s Office for Emergency Relief and Recovery, or GOFERR.
Renters in line for more relief
Published: 2/15/2021 7:32:28 AM
Can New Hampshire spend $200 million in federal money to keep people in their homes when it wasn’t able to spend $20 million last year for the same purpose?
That’s the question being asked by state officials, housing activists, tenants and landlords while they wait – after the state’s Housing Relief Program ended on Dec. 18 – for the new federal Emergency Rental Assistance program to begin.
And no one really knows the answer.
“It depends on the universe of need that’s out there,” said Taylor Caswell, commissioner of the Department of Business and Economic Affairs and executive director of the Governor’s Office for Emergency Relief and Recovery, or GOFERR.
Giving on the rise, but so is need
Patrick Tufts, CEO of Granite United Way, helps to distribute more than 177,000 pounds of food to NH families in need. Courtesy
Published: 2/15/2021 11:55:46 AM
For more than a century, Granite United Way reached donors at their workplaces or in their living rooms with traditional face-to-face conversations. Now with benefactors sitting tight in their homes to buffer against the coronavirus, CEO Patrick Tufts finds himself broadcasting to 300 boxes on a Zoom screen from his office.
Tufts, a fundraising veteran, laments the loss of that personal connection. It is challenging to maintain contact with people who still depend on a paper pledge card.
Housing relief program grinds to halt without funding
Published: 1/29/2021 4:39:06 PM
Seven months after its creation, a New Hampshire program to assist renters and homeowners is frozen, with no applications being accepted since Dec. 18.
Instead, the New Hampshire Housing Relief Fund is sitting in limbo. The state’s assistance agencies are unable to distribute aid even as New Hampshire awaits $200 million in additional funding for housing, passed as part of an end-of-year coronavirus relief package in Congress.
The situation is causing worry for at least one state official.
“The timing of the housing relief program ending and the start of the new funding has been a concern for a lot of people,” said Melissa Hatfield, chief of the state’s Bureau of Homeless and Housing Services, on a conference call with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen earlier this month. “I’m fielding emails about that around the clock. It was a decision that was made at some other level.”