American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA)
Emergency Rental Assistance Program
Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) in the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) provided more than $21.5 billion in emergency rental assistance to help millions of families keep up on their rent and remain in their homes.
The Houston-Harris County Emergency Rental Assistance Program (“HHC ERAP”) was designed to deliver rental assistance effectively, centering ease of access and support of applicants, leveraging technology and data, and striving for an equitable distribution. To do so, we relied on a network of relationships across the County and built on experience gained from previously funded rental assistance programs – including those delivered with CARES funds.
The City of Houston and Harris County teamed up to create a unified program with a single set of guidelines and eligibility requirements, one application, one call center, and one website (houstonharrishelp.org). Unlike past rental relief programs, tenants fill out the same forms regardless of where they live within the county, and likewise, landlords who own properties inside and outside city limits only had to learn one set of rules—an improvement which initially increased landlord participation to over 18,000 properties.
HHC ERAP fully launched in March 2021, and by the end of the month, $14 million had been disbursed between City and County funds. Along with the program administrators BakerRipley and Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston (“Catholic Charities”), who handled application processing and payment, the program brought on a team of nine community navigators. These navigators were local nonprofits across the City and County that served to support tenants with outreach, application preparation, CDC moratorium declaration preparation, and referrals to additional services.
Those navigators included: The Alliance for Multicultural Community Services (“The Alliance”), Chinese Community Center, Hope Disaster Recovery, Humble Area Assistance Ministries, East Harris County Empowerment Council, Houston Area Urban League, Memorial Assistance Ministries, Northwest Assistance Ministries, and YMCA of Greater Houston.
Over the next few months, several new tools were added to the program, including a direct assistance application option, an easy-to-use status checker for tenants, and a landlord portal, where landlords could view all active applications for their properties at any time. Additional funds were utilized to support tenants in eviction proceedings with the new program administrator, The Alliance, and in-person outreach events were held.
In July 2021, ERA1 funds had nearly all been distributed, and the program began using ERA2 funds. As reported over $150 million had been disbursed to over 40,000 families.
On July 21, 2021 Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo visited Houston and met with program partners to share components of program success. HHC ERAP was commended in a Treasury press release as “one of the nation's strongest local ERA programs.” The City and County’s regional partnership was highlighted as one of the successful factors, along with the competency and strength of the program administrators.
In Q4 of 2021, both Harris County and the City of Houston began to request reallocated ERA1 funds from the Treasury when available, as both grantees had met disbursement benchmarks. Ultimately, the overall program received $36 million in the first 3 rounds of reallocated funds. Harris County applied for and received a fourth round of reallocated funds in November 2022 and made the decision to recharacterize ERA2 expenses to utilize this funding, as there was little time to disburse it normally. With original ERA1 and ERA2 awards nearly all spent, these ERA1 reallocated funds supported the 2022 program.
With less funding available in 2022, and a rising number of eviction cases in the area, the HHC ERAP shifted to an eviction intervention model, to focus only on renters with an active eviction case.
In Q2 of 2022, the program saw the number of viable applications decrease as landlords opted out of the program and decided to proceed with eviction. To allow more households to apply, the application was now available for renters who receive a notice to vacate or an eviction citation. The program initiated outreach with community partners and worked with our system partner, Connective, for more targeted outreach. Connective created an eviction docket data dashboard, which enabled them to match eviction docket data with system contact data, and reach out to households who did not have a current rental assistance application.
To increase our application efficiency, we worked with Connective to monitor our application throughput data, and program administrators made changes to landlord outreach and verification processes. The program worked to close out eviction cases where judgements had already been made, clearing the way for eligible applications to be worked on.
As the program worked to disburse the remaining reallocated ERA1 funding by the December 2022 deadline, our throughput analysis indicated that we would likely not be able to fund all of our existing applications in queue. The program decided to suspend the application on November 1st, 2022, and continued to work through applications submitted in previous months until wrapping up disbursement by end of December. Between the 2021 and 2022 programs, we were able to disburse nearly all ERA1 funds received, a total of $181.8 million disbursed to over 40,000 rental assistance applications.
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