Today is the first day since March 2020 that tenants in New York state can be legally evicted from their residences.
The end of the state's COVID-19 eviction moratorium is to have a drastic impact on New York's housing landscape and the economy at large — and Auburn is no exception.
When it comes to housing, Cayuga County Director of Community Services Ray Bizzari told мÓƶà¶à¿ª½±¼Ç¼ that the expiration will be "devastating."
The number of people in emergency housing in the county is close to an all-time high already, Bizzari said. Without the moratorium, that number will likely soar much higher in the immediate months. According to the New York State Unified Court System Division of Technology & Court Research, there were 215 eviction filings in Cayuga County last year, and 168 in 2020.
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"If you pushed another 50 people into emergency housing today, we might not be able to accommodate that," Bizzari said. "If we're talking another 300 people — there's just nowhere to put them."Â
On the other hand, the moratorium is expected to help landlords, some of whom have been losing rental income for almost two years now. It's a delicate balancing act, Bizzari said, between their financial interests and the humanitarian demands of the pandemic. One way the state has tried to strike that balance has been the Emergency Rental Assistance Program.
Locally, the county has coordinated the program with Community Action Programs Cayuga/Seneca, the Auburn Rescue Mission and Chapel House homeless shelter. As of the end of 2021, Bizzari said, 755 applications for assistance were received from county landlords and tenants. Of those, 231 were processed into arrears payments averaging $4,367 each. Another 334 applications for prospective rent of up to three months were processed into payments averaging $2,114 each. Overall, payments so far total $1,955,814.Â
Between the state's "cranky" application portal, the amount of information required and the need for landlords and tenants to apply together, the program has been challenging, Bizzari said.
"All the things you think would go wrong with a massive undertaking like this, have gone wrong," he said.
The program funds allocated to Cayuga County are exhausted, Bizzari added. Any remaining funds will go to the 190 applications that have yet to be processed.
Some of those applications were submitted by landlord Anna Boim-Marinelli, who rents out about a dozen single-family houses in Auburn and Cayuga County with her husband, Michael. The couple have received payments for two applications they submitted not long after the portal opened in May, and awaits payments for another three applications.
Though Boim-Marinelli works a full-time job, the rental income is important to her and her husband, who maintains the properties full-time. They've continued to pay for that maintenance through the pandemic, along with insurance, taxes and utilities. As a result, the loss of income has caused the landlords "a lot of hardship," she told мÓƶà¶à¿ª½±¼Ç¼.Â
"People think we have all these properties, so we must be rich. But it doesn't work that way. We have expenses just like everyone else," she said. "I didn't just magically get these places, we had to work hard to buy them. I don't have some secret inheritance lying around someplace. We work hard for these places every day."
Not all that lost income will be replaced by funds from the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, either. One of Boim-Marinelli's tenants, who wouldn't work with her to file an application, left his residence Monday. In the process, he left her and her husband with $6,976 in unpaid rent since the summer. He also left a mess that will require weeks of cleaning by the landlords — more time that they can't collect income from the residence. Boim-Marinelli said she believes the tenant could afford to pay his rent, but chose not to because of the moratorium.Â
Without the moratorium, Boim-Marinelli would have evicted the tenant months ago. That's one example why the landlord is "very happy" it expires today. She pointed out that 95% of her tenants are not a problem, and she believes that percentage is the same for other landlords she knows. But in her opinion, the moratorium encouraged the behavior of the bad apples.
"People took advantage," she said. "This moratorium showed me how people can be, and I wish that I never found out."
There are bad apple landlords as well, noted Bizzari. He's heard stories of some who responded to the moratorium by neglecting maintenance work like furnace repairs.Â
Danielle Cornwell, who worked with the county on the assistance program as community services director of CAP Cayuga/Seneca, said the belief that all tenants can afford to pay rent during the pandemic is often ignorant of reality. Many of the ones she's worked with experienced a combination of job loss, delayed unemployment insurance payments, and either new child care expenses or the inability to leave their homes due to their children being out of school. Those conditions go back to March 2020, she noted, so government relief sometimes isn't adequate.
"When you're behind on not just one bill, but all of them, that money kind of digs you out of the hole but it doesn't help you move forward," Cornwell said. "It wasn't easy, and it still isn't."
Like Bizzari, Cornwell expects the expiration of the state's eviction moratorium to uproot a significant number of people in Cayuga County.
The only question, she said, is whether that happens immediately or whether the assistance program delays the process by a few months. She also noted that landlords have a separate program, the Landlord Rental Assistance Program, for relief. That program was more appropriate for landlords who lost income from tenants who left their residences, like Boim-Marinelli.
"It's a definite struggle for both sides," Cornwell said. "Everybody's been affected by this pandemic."
Lake Life Editor David Wilcox can be reached at (315) 282-2245 or david.wilcox@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter . Note: мÓƶà¶à¿ª½±¼Ç¼ attempted to interview tenants who will be affected by the end of the state's eviction moratorium, posting messages on social media and in the newspaper, but was unable to make contact with any.