New York legislators voted Wednesday on extending an eviction moratorium for renters who are behind on rent because of the pandemic, as approximately $2.3 billion in rent relief funds go unused.
The moratorium was also revised after the Supreme Court last month struck down part of the law.
Governor Kathy Hochul called the Legislature to return with a goal of putting evictions on hold until January 15.
New York’s previous eviction moratorium, which included foreclosure protections for property owners, expired Tuesday.
The extension gives more time to distribute the roughly $2.3 billion of mostly federal funding earmarked for the Emergency Rental Assistance programme.
The programme was approved in April and opened to applications on June 1, but as of August 23, only $203 million of those funds had been distributed.
According to US Treasury estimates, 28 per cent of New Yorkers behind on rent who applied to the programme were still waiting for a response, while 70 per cent had yet to apply.
In making her case for calling the session, Hochul said she believed that many New Yorkers could go homeless if evictions were permitted to proceed.
She said that they weren’t going to intensify what’s already a crisis in terms of the homelessness problem, and they weren’t going to let people who through no fault of their own lost income, would not be able to pay and faced eviction.
According to a survey by the US Census Bureau, as many as 700,000 or 21 per cent of New York renters are behind on rent, totalling approximately $2.3 billion in debt.
New York trails only California, which has more than 750,000 people behind on rent, totalling more than $2.8 billion in debt.
New York legislators also changed how the moratorium works.
In an August 12 ruling, the US Supreme Court nixed part of the law that enabled tenants to delay eviction proceedings just by filing a form stating they’d had a pandemic related hardship.
The court said that landlords should have the ability to challenge those hardships in court.
The new bill allows landlords to challenge applications for tenants they believe have not suffered economic hardship in court.
Landlord groups and state Republicans, however, say the change doesn’t go far enough, and Joseph Strasburg from the Rent Stabilization Association, a landlord group, told CBS 2 that they’re going to ask their attorney to make a motion to enforce the Supreme Court order and to stay the new legislation.
Rental assistance should go directly to the landlord, not to the renter, that way the landlord gets their money directly and can still pay their mortgage if they have one on their home.
But this is all about delays until the landlords are so much in debt that they lose their properties to foreclosure or some greedy property investment corporation, who will give them pennies on the dollar, but then this is the plan folks.
Why doesn’t New York pay the rent of those that they claim to support instead of putting it on the backs of the landlords? The reason why is because they want these landlords to go into default because you can’t have a socialist society if people own their properties, and this is just a government takeover of private property.
The government aren’t working for you anymore, especially when that government introduces laws restricting what you can do with your property, and people should wake up because this is about the government taking over private property, and in the end, you will never own anything if this is permitted to continue.
They just want you to be poor serfs reliant upon them!
