Edwin Bautista was a senior at the University of Texas at Austin and a part-time technician at a consulting firm when inflation began to hurt his purchasing power. After his rent rose above $1,000 a month in early 2021, he feared he would have to move until he got a $7,300 lifeline from the federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program.

That kept him in his apartment and even helped him build a little nest egg. Now that he’s graduated and working full time, he’s a new home buyer.

Bautista is one of millions of tenants who have benefited from temporary programs put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic, including eviction restrictions, income support and the rent assistance program. One of the most ambitious emergency housing investments in the country’s history, it has disbursed $46 billion in aid to state and local governments since early 2021 and kept millions of people in their homes, according to an analysis of government data by Bloomberg News.

With rents still rising and the economy at risk of recession, housing advocates are urging the Biden administration to continue helping tenants. That will be tough under legislation signed into law last weekend that suspended the nation’s borrowing limit as it reclaimed unused pandemic aid and placed limits on future increases in the federal budget.

We are facing an affordable housing crisis in this country, but Republican lawmakers are pushing to cut funding for and jeopardize the future of critical housing programs that support working families, said Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) in a statement.

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Surveys conducted by the US Census Bureau show that an average of 48.46 million people reported falling behind on their rent in the first quarter of this year, 4.7 million more than before the Emergency Rental Assistance Program was introduced when the economy was in recovery. staggering was from closures. While the estimated number of renters in the country increased during the period, the number of people fell behind on their rent.

This policy drove the number of eviction applications to an all-time low.”

according to

a report from the Expulsion Lab

mention

. Deportation requests were cut by more than half

inor

31 cities they sampled, largely because of COVID-era policies, according to the Lab, a housing research group at Princeton University.

Nevertheless, Republicans have shown little appetite for continuing pandemic-era programs, including for rent assistance, as they try to reduce the federal budget deficit.

Progressive efforts to make crisis programs permanent even after an emergency has passed is just another example of how Democrats are spending tax dollars we don’t have, said Rep. Patrick McHenry (RN.C.), a key negotiator on the debt limit bill, in a statement. Now it’s time to end this program.

The Treasury Department allowed states, counties and cities to use the emergency rent support in three ways: for direct assistance to households, for housing stability measures, and for administrative expenditures. About $33 billion of the $46 billion was used for direct aid to more than 7 million households, according to a Bloomberg review of Treasury data.

LA County regulators are proposing to pass permanent rent control

States sent an average of 70% of their used resources directly to tenants and landlords, and those who spent the most money for direct assistance tended to help more tenants stay on top of their rent, suggesting the program had the desired effect. California, for example, used more than 75% of the $5.6 billion allocated to it from its rent assistance program for direct assistance to tenants and landlords. The result: an average of 986,000 tenants were behind the rent more than before the program started. New York saw about 440,000 residents catch up, or nearly 10% of the state’s renters.

North Dakota spent less on rent payments and is one of four states of Louisiana, South Carolina and Georgia to see an increase in rent arrears.

Direct assistance was limited to renters with incomes less than 80% of the area’s median income who could demonstrate they were at risk of homelessness and

other

faced financial difficulties due to the pandemic.

Bautista, the former University of Texas student, was eligible

requirements

. He now works as a management assistant for a low-income housing coalition. He also provides affordable housing advice to students and recent graduates.

“I shouldn’t be where I am now,” he said. This program has changed my life.

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The Treasury Department and state governments were criticized for distributing money too slowly at the start of the program. Some states even reassigned their funding.

The Treasury Department said it was keeping some information

,

like the number of dollars distributed, the number of households served

,

and the demographics of the applicants. However, program administrators said they didn’t have the bandwidth to measure or gauge whether recipients were able to catch up on rent as the money dispersed.

We were in a race with time. Experts predicted a tsunami of evictions if we didn’t get emergency rent payments flowing before the eviction moratorium expired, Gene Sperling, a senior White House adviser and coordinator of the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan, said in a statement. The fact that we actually saw exposure rates fall below historical averages proves that we received payments on time.

Eviction data is hard to come by, says Peter Hepburn, associate director of the Eviction Lab. There are more than 3,000 independently administered district courts that handle evictions, many of which often keep records sealed, non-digitized, or both.

The lab credits pandemic measures for preventing at least 800,000 evictions in 31 U.S. metropolitan areas it studied.

The rent assistance program itself has been a godsend and a blessing to anyone who has been able to use that money to stay in housing, said Mark Fessler, deputy director of litigation and training at the nonprofit South Carolina Legal Services.