Rent one-shot denials double in five years

Rejections for emergency rental aid are piling up in New York City, putting tenants and landlords in a bind.

The Department of Social Services rejected two-thirds of the more than 51,000 applications for aid to the One-Shot Deal program in the first nine months of 2022, Gothamist reported. The program can provide loans for back rent, though recipients can also land loans for storage fees, electric bills and moving costs; the rejection data, however, only applies to rent arrears requests and most other requests were approved.

The rate of rejection is roughly double what it was five years ago. That’s a difficult pill to swallow for renters, who typically fall back on the program as a last resort. In fiscal year 2022, which concluded at the end of June of last year, grants averaged $4,300.

During fiscal years 2018 and 2019, grants were approved for about $260 million each year. For fiscal year 2022, that dropped all the way down to $100 million, though that could largely be linked to renters applying for the Emergency Rental Assistance Program instead. The One-Shot Deal deferred to ERAP in most cases because ERAP is a state program.

The reasons for the rejection surges are hard to pin down. One issue is that the program stipulates borrowers have the ability to pay back rent in the future, even if it needs to happen in installments. This can disqualify the unemployed.

A more pressing concern is staffing and application backlogs. Individual DSS employees are handling many more applications than they were before, forcing some to reject incomplete applications, rather than try to follow up with the applicant if time allows. Many tenants struggle to complete the paperwork without a lawyer’s help.

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Correlation is not causation, but evictions are rising alongside One-Shot Deal rent application rejections. Landlords have filed more than 178,000 evictions in the past 18 months. That’s higher than it was since the start of Covid — when a moratorium froze evictions — but still well below the level of eviction filings for the full year of 2019.

Just as one-shot deals are a final hope for renters, the same is true for landlords, who have been battling to be made whole again. At the end of last year, Jay Martin, executive director of the landlord group Community Housing Improvement Program, suggested the state help fund the city one-shots. In the eyes of one landlord, the best remaining option would be to sue.

— Holden Walter-Warner