Harrison County gets $6M in COVID relief funds to help renters. Here’s how to apply
Mississippi Coast residents who have fallen behind on rent payments since the pandemic began are eligible for a new round of relief money from the federal government.
Harrison County has received $6 million for emergency rental assistance from the U.S. Treasury Department, as part of more than $21.6 billion to help renters in the American Rescue Plan, plus $25 billion in an earlier stimulus package. The state of Mississippi is getting at least $152 million for rental assistance, according to the Treasury Department.
The grant will allow qualified families to get funding for up to 12 months of unpaid rent, and up to three months of assistance with rent moving forward.
The money will be paid directly to landlords, so they’ll get relief, too, said Mary Simons, executive director of the Open Doors Homeless Coalition, which is administering the Harrison County grant.
“It’s huge,” Simons said. “It is absolutely huge. The fact that people can be assisted to remain stably in their homes means we will not have the mass evictions that people were concerned about at the beginning of the pandemic.
“We also will be able to ensure that landlords, as small businesses, are able to become whole as long as the tenants remain in their units.”
Who qualifies for help?
Your income must be below $48,700 for a family of four, or below $34,100 for an individual. (This is 80% of the area’s median income and below.)
You must have either qualified for unemployment or “experienced a reduction in household income, incurred significant costs, or experienced a financial hardship due to COVID-19.”
You must demonstrate a risk of homelessness or housing instability.
How to apply for assistance
- First, check with your landlord to see if they have already been in touch with Open Doors Homeless Coalition. Simons said the coalition is already working with a number of large landlords across the county who have identified tenants eligible for the relief. If your landlord has already connected with Open Doors, they will schedule a time for you, Open Doors and your landlord to meet and gather necessary paperwork.
- If your landlord has not connected with Open Doors, call 228-604-8011 and leave a message with a callback number. Open Doors will return your call to determine if you are eligible for assistance.
- If you are eligible, you will need to provide a few documents, including information about your income or unemployment benefits, and any documentation that your hardship was caused by the pandemic. If you don’t have documents, you can write a statement explaining how the pandemic caused you to fall behind on rent payments.
- After a review, Open Doors will contact you and your landlord if you are eligible for assistance. Checks for rent will be made out to your landlord on your behalf.
What should I do if I don’t live in Harrison County?
Only counties with populations of 200,000 or more were eligible for this particular grant from the Treasury Department. In Mississippi, only Harrison and Hinds Counties qualified.
But the state as a whole is also receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in rental assistance through the same programs. This will be administered by the Mississippi Home Corporation through the Rental Assistance for Mississippians Program (RAMP).
If you do not live in Harrison County, apply for this funding at https://ms-ramp.com/.
Both tenants and landlords can apply, and funds will be paid directly to landlords and utility providers.
This funding can be used for rent payments “as well as utilities and home energy costs including electricity, gas, water and sewer, trash removal, and energy costs, such as fuel oil. The funding cannot be used for telephone, cable or internet expenses.”
What’s different with this round of funding?
Previous rounds of funding for renters were slow to reach needy families in part because of a technicality.
The Centers for Disease Control issued a temporary ban on evictions nationwide starting in September 2020. If a renter could demonstrate they had lost income due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they could invoke the CDC rule to stay in their home. The Sun Herald reported that not all Mississippi judges followed the moratorium.
But even if a judge ruled the CDC moratorium applied, the renter was no longer eligible for emergency rental assistance because they were not close enough to becoming homeless.
Thus, people who invoked the moratorium could stay in their homes, but unpaid rent piled up and landlords’ losses accumulated.
That restriction doesn’t apply to this round of funding, Simons said.
“It causes a significant amount of stress to have the amount of debt that has been created through the pandemic,” Simons said. “If someone hasn’t been able to pay their rent for six months, they have 6 months of debt there, that even if they start work tomorrow, it will be in many cases impossible to catch that back up without assistance. And so that stress can impact people’s emotional health as well as physical health.”
How many people will get help?
Simons estimates the $6 million grant will cover assistance for 500 households. About 75 people have already been deemed qualified and are close to receiving the money, she said.
Other families likely to receive relief have been identified through conversations with big landlords in the county. At most big apartment complexes, she said, there are about 15 families who need the rental assistance.
“We want to make sure that everyone has the opportunity, everyone who needs the help has the opportunity to apply,” she said.
Ultimately, though, she doesn’t think $6 million will cover all the need in Harrison County. When the money runs out, Harrison County residents will also be eligible to apply for relief from the state through RAMP.
This story was originally published March 22, 2021 at 1:13 PM.
