De todo un poco!
The United States has announced it is sending additional military assistance to Ukraine, including anti-tank and air defense capabilities. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy implored the world to help his people resist a full-scale Russian invasion, saying it is imperative to hold on to the capital city, Kyiv. VOA’s Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine reports.
A day before she was due to be evicted in November from her Atlanta home, Shanelle King heard that she had been awarded about $15,000 in rental assistance. She could breathe again.
But then the 43-year-old hairdresser got a letter last month from her landlord saying the company was canceling her lease in March —- seven months early — without any explanation.
“I’m really pissed about it. I thought I would be comfortable again back in my home,” said King, whose work dried up during the pandemic and who now worries about finding another apartment she can afford. “Here I am back up against the wall with nowhere to stay. I don’t know what I am going to do.”
Although the $46.5 billion Emergency Rental Assistance Program has paid out tens of billions of dollars to help avert an eviction crisis, some tenants, like King, who received help are finding themselves threatened with eviction again — sometimes days after getting federal help. Many are finding it nearly impossible to find another affordable place to live.
“It is a Band-Aid. It was never envisioned as anything more than a Band-Aid,” Erin Willoughby, director of the Clayton Housing Legal Resource Center Atlanta, said of the program.
“It’s not solving the underlying problem, which is a lack of affordable housing. People are on the hook for rents they cannot afford to pay,” she said. “Simply finding something cheaper is not an option because there is not anything cheaper. People have to be housed somewhere.”
The National Housing Law Project, in a survey last fall of nearly 120 legal aid attorneys and civil rights advocates, found that 86% of respondents reported cases in which landlords either refused to take assistance or accepted the money and still moved to evict tenants. The survey also found a significant increase in cases of landlords lying in court to evict tenants and illegally locking them out.
“A number of issues could be described as issues related to landlord fraud … and a set of problems I would describe as loopholes within the … program that made it less effective to accomplish the goal,” said Natalie N. Maxwell, a senior attorney with the group.
National Apartment Association President and CEO Bob Pinnegar said the survey was not based on facts, adding that its members are doing everything they can to keep tenants in their homes, including lobbying to get rental assistance out faster.
“Skewed surveys aren’t reflective of the entire situation. By and large the rental housing industry has gone to great lengths to support residents, including when it comes to rental assistance and adherence to laws and regulations,” Pinnegar said in a statement.
Legal aid attorneys interviewed across the country confirmed they are seeing a steady increase in cases where tenants were approved for rental help and still faced eviction.
These include the mother of a newborn and two other children in Florida who received rental assistance but was ordered evicted after the landlord refused to take the money. Another Florida landlord lied in court that she hadn’t received the money in a bid to push through an eviction.
There have also been cases in Georgia and Texas where landlords who received assistance moved to end leases early, increased rents to unaffordable levels or found other reasons than nonpayment to evict someone, lawyers said.
“As it is right now, it doesn’t seem to be working as intended,” said Tori Tavormina, an eviction prevention specialist with Texas Housers. “It feels much more like it’s a program that is alleviating the pressure of the eviction crisis but not solving the underlying problems.”
District Court Judge Shera Grant, who handles housing cases in Birmingham, Alabama, said she and her fellow judges have seen an uptick in cases of landlords getting assistance and returning to court a few weeks later after a tenant has fallen behind on rent to seek an eviction. So far they have prevented them — though she expects a spike in these kinds of cases going forward.
“It’s incumbent on the judges to make sure we are paying close attention to our eviction cases and making sure that the landlord is not having their cake and eating it too,” she said. “By the same token, we are not forcing landlords to take the money. There are some unfortunate circumstances where the tenant has to be evicted.”
In the case of King, she believes her landlord was retaliating for earlier complaints about mold and water leaks in her three-bedroom house. The company King was dealing with, NDI Maxim, which manages property for owners, said it “was not at liberty to share details of tenants’ status nor their payment records.”
Other cases are complicated by the length of the pandemic and conflicting accounts of landlord and tenant. And they often leave both parties feeling shortchanged.
Despite his landlord getting more than $20,000 in rental assistance, Prince Beatty is facing imminent eviction from his three-bedroom house in East Point, Georgia.
After the money was approved, Beatty signed an agreement in court late last year to pay several thousand dollars more that he owed as a condition to remain housed. He went back to the county for additional assistance to cover the balance but says he was denied. Unable to find warehouse work during the pandemic, the 47-year-old Navy veteran still can’t pay rent and is now $12,000 behind, in part due to his rent increasing from $1,250-a-month to $2,000.
Beatty, who was told he would be evicted this month, said he wakes most mornings in a panic, wondering if this will be the day when marshals “come and disrespect my stuff and throw it in the street.”
His landlord, Monique Jones, said she tried to work with Beatty. But she said he violated the lease by subletting rooms to several other people and that the amount of rental assistance has not covered losses from months of unpaid rent that started before the pandemic.
“It was helpful but it did not address the underlying issue which is his nonpayment of rent,” she said of the rental assistance. “That still remains and that is rightfully why I am proceeding. If I have a tenant who will pay rent and abides by the lease, I would not attempt to evict.”
Limits with rental assistance often come down to some states and localities failing to follow Treasury Department guidance calling for policies requiring landlords delay evictions after getting money. Although the program prevents landlords from evicting during the period covered by rental assistance, the Treasury Department can only encourage states to adopt policies that ban evictions up to three months afterward.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition found only 29 states and localities in 2021 had adopted policies that prohibit landlords who participate in the rental assistance program from evicting tenants for a period ranging from 30 days to 12 months. Six states — Arizona, Kentucky, Louisiana, New York, North Carolina and West Virginia — passed regulations while several cities or counties in Texas and Maryland did.
Gene Sperling, who is charged with overseeing implementation of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package, said there was no data to suggest landlords evicting tenants after getting assistance is a “pervasive issue” but that it was “completely unacceptable.”
While it’s “not against the letter of the act, it’s against the spirit of it,” he said.
The Coalition also said the program’s issues illustrate a larger problem.
“We are in the middle of a severe affordable housing crisis with gaping holes in our social safety net,” CEO Diane Yentel said. “We have a systemic power imbalance that favored landlords at the expense of low-income tenants. Emergency rental assistance and eviction moratoriums were a patch to those holes.”
Six months after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, lawmakers have few good options for sending aid to prop up the struggling Afghan economy without enabling the Taliban.
In the almost 20 years the U.S. was involved in Afghanistan, the country depended on foreign aid for more than half its economy. But the U.S. froze most of the country’s $9.4 billion in currency reserves last August to isolate the Taliban after they took control.
“There is frankly moral hazard in putting billions into Afghanistan right now,” Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said in a congressional hearing Wednesday. “We can do our best to route it around the Taliban, but there is no doubt that the partial effect of aid is to save the Taliban from itself. That is deeply distasteful.”
The United Nations issued an appeal to the international community last month for its largest-ever aid ask, saying $4.4 billion was needed as “a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe looms.” According to estimates by the World Food Program, only 2% of Afghans will have enough to eat this winter.
“Six months ago, Afghanistan was a poor country, a very poor country,” David Miliband, president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, told lawmakers. “Today, Afghanistan is a starving country, not just a poor country. The reason — I’m very sorry to report — the proximate cause of this starvation crisis is the international economic policy, which has been adopted since August and which has cut off financial flows not just to the public sector but in the private sector, in Afghanistan, as well.”
Miliband testified that his staff could confirm media reports that Afghans are selling organs to buy enough to eat amid a fall in currency prices that has dropped the value by at least one-quarter.
Top lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee acknowledged that the Afghan people are suffering because of the United States’ concerns about enabling the Taliban’s repressive policies. But many warned of the dangers of sending aid.
“We of course must continue to be vigilant in our efforts to deny the Taliban any resources — financial or otherwise — they can use to conduct further acts of terror,” said Republican Senator Todd Young. “The worst-case scenario involved would be if humanitarian aid were diverted from legitimate recipients towards the Taliban and (their) partners and terror.”
The heads of nongovernmental organizations acknowledged the difficulty of easing some U.S. sanctions based on negotiations with the Taliban.
“The (U.S.) Treasury cannot feasibly list every permitted sector in the Afghan economy. Instead, U.S. officials must forbid what is not allowed — for example, arms trafficking,” said Graeme Smith, a consultant with the International Crisis Group.
“Unfortunately, many of these steps require cooperation with the Taliban. That is hard, and it is distasteful, especially as the Taliban continue to flout human rights standards. Months of talks between the Taliban and Western officials have not resulted in much progress when the impasse is partly the Taliban’s fault. They have resisted reasonable demands such as allowing education for girls of all ages. However, the U.S. is also pushing unrealistic goals, such as an inclusive government.”
Smith and Miliband told lawmakers the U.S. could take several steps to ease the humanitarian crisis, including releasing $1.2 billion in the World Bank-managed Afghan Reconstruction Fund to directly pay the salaries of Afghans, clarifying the application of U.S. sanctions in the private sector of Afghanistan’s economy, and releasing private assets while keeping Afghan government assets frozen.
But easing those restrictions could be a tough political argument to U.S. lawmakers weighing the cost of the U.S. effort to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan in trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost.
Democratic Senator Jean Shaheen said Wednesday, “We need to provide humanitarian assistance to ensure that the people of Afghanistan, the families in Afghanistan, are not starving. And I understand that that means to some extent, we’ve got to thread the needle. But I really reject the premise that we should enshrine with the Taliban their restrictive relationships with their citizens.”
The Biden administration pledged last month to donate an additional $308 million in humanitarian aid to address the crisis.
The U.S. military is sending a guided missile destroyer to the United Arab Emirates and deploying fighter jets to help the UAE as it contends with missile attacks from Houthi rebels in Yemen.
The Pentagon said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin discussed the moves in a phone call Tuesday with Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
A Pentagon statement said the USS Cole will “partner with the UAE Navy before making a port call in Abu Dhabi.”
“The Secretary also informed the Crown Prince of his decision to deploy 5th Generation Fighter aircraft to assist the UAE against the current threat and as a clear signal that the United States stands with the UAE as a long-standing strategic partner,” the statement said.
A January 17 rebel attack killed three foreign workers at an Abu Dhabi oil facility.
One week later, UAE and U.S. forces at Abu Dhabi’s Al Dhafra airbase launched interceptor missiles to destroy two Houthi missiles.
A third attack came Monday, with UAE missiles intercepting a Houthi rocket during a visit from Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
The UAE is part of a Saudi-led coalition, which since 2015 has battled the Houthi rebels in defense of Yemen’s internationally recognized government.
Some information for this report came from Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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