With unemployment at historic highs, Pennsylvania is careening toward a housing crisis.
Thousands of residents will face eviction unless state legislators intervene, and there’s precious little time left in the legislative session.
Gov. Tom Wolf has used executive order to kick the can down the road as far as his authority under the Emergency Management Code has allowed. But he’s at the end of the road — a statewide eviction moratorium expires Monday, and current relief efforts are dogged by red tape and funding caps.
Democratic state Reps. Elizabeth Fiedler and Austin Davis have introduced a measure to expand housing, rental and mortgage assistance programs. Their plan, like the CARES Act and earlier federal relief funding, does not provide significant oversight.
But in a crisis, compromises must be struck.
Republican lawmakers should move quickly to pass or propose their own ideas for keeping thousands of Pennsylvanians in their homes.
Reps. Fiedler and Davis’ legislation would add an additional $100 million to the Mortgage and Rental Assistance Program, currently set at $150 million. It would remove the need to verify unemployment status with the state and federal government, end the need for renters and homeowners to go at least 30 days late on payments to get help and set aside a portion of aid to go to small “mom and pop” landlords instead of large management companies.
It is neither fair nor prudent to simply transfer the burden of rent cost from tenants to landlords while maintaining an indefinite moratorium on evictions. Making additional funds available to renters and landlords to cover some of the lost costs would help both survive the pandemic.
State government imposed the shutdowns that resulted in tens of thousands of jobs lost and eliminated for the sake of saving lives. While a more libertarian approach might be to resist the urge to use government funding to intervene in this situation, the government itself created these externalities and should be responsible in part for managing the consequences.
More than 390,000 renter households in Pennsylvania did not pay rent in July, according to census survey data.
This need is critical.
Bipartisanship is failing at the federal level. The state Legislature needs to do better.
