Report: Aid for rent, utilities served low-income households; LINC knows 'It was no accident'
Google Maps photo from May 2021
It started slowly, but once federal pandemic aid for rent and utilities began reaching Americans in need, more than 80% went as designed to low-income households, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
The new data is available for only 67% of the recipients, but the numbers reported by The Washington Post Feb. 24 provided a snapshot of who has been benefiting from the fund’s $46.5 billion in relief.
LINC played a key role in the Kansas City area, training staff and building a digital system to help qualifying residents complete the complicated process of uploading documents and completing the government application.
Members of LINC’s team process applications for utility bill assistance in June 2021.
Nationwide, the Post’s report showed, 42% of the primary applicants identified as Black and 20% identified as Hispanic or Latino. Most of the applicants — more than 65% — were women.
LINC’s efforts operated from the Morning Star Missionary Baptist Church Youth and Family Life Center at 27th Street and Prospect Avenue, where LINC focused on reaching out to households in neighborhoods that were most impacted by the pandemic and at risk of being disconnected from relief campaigns.
The nationwide data is encouraging, Noel Poyo, the Treasury’s deputy assistant secretary for community economic development, told The Post. There were some operating costs nationwide in distributing the funds, and some recipients could qualify for aid without being low-income if they suffered significant financial losses because of Covid. The 80% rate of direct aid to low-income households is an important achievement.
“You don’t reach very low-income people and communities of color by accident,” Poyo said, “because it’s actually harder to reach people who have been most impacted by the pandemic and that tend to face the most barriers to access.”
Some applicants with income above poverty lines could qualify for relief funds if they suffered a significant loss in income because of the pandemic.
The Treasury Department set guidelines to direct the relief to households in need, and non-profit agencies like LINC adopted the practices.
LINC’s team processed more than $1.6 million in utility and rental assistance, reaching more than a thousand households.
Other Kansas City area agencies and non-profits processed applications, including the Mid-America Assistance Coalition, the Community Services League, the United Way of Greater Kansas City, Metro Lutheran Ministries, the Community Assistance Council, the Guadalupe Centers and others.
Workers at Kansas City’s emergency rental assistance center help customers in September 2021.
Nationwide, the Post reported, 3.8 million payments were made to households in 2021, totaling $20.6 billion. The remaining funds of the $46.5 billion have already been obligated to cover pending payments to landlords or utility companies, or to be distributed to local jurisdictions to cover pledged payments.
The fund, named the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, was passed in two packages by Congress in December 2020 and March 2021. For several months the fund was going mostly untapped as jurisdictions struggled to find ways to connect it to households in need.
LINC and Morning Star set up its clinic in the spring in 2021, setting up a digital process and bringing in representatives from Evergy, Spire and Kansas City Water Services to help qualify customers for the aid.
Later that summer, the City of Kansas City created similar clinics to speed the process and by October 2021 had distributed more than 80% of the $25 million in relief allotted to Kansas City.