Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On The New Eviction Moratorium And Calling On State Governments To Do A Better Job Distributing Emergency Rental Assistance

Washington, D.C. –  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor regarding the new eviction moratorium in areas with high levels of COVID transmission. Senator Schumer also called on state governments to fix the inexcusable delays in rental assistance and immediately begin disbursing these funds. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:

Earlier this week, the Biden Administration announced that the CDC will adopt an eviction moratorium to provide critical protections for another sixty days as our country continues its path towards full recovery.

I applaud everyone who made it happen: from the President, to the CDC, to Speaker Pelosi, to Senator Brown, as well as several of my Democratic colleagues in the House, including a brave band of New Yorkers, including Congress member Ocasio-Cortez and Congressman Jones.

Above all, Representative Cori Bush gets huge credit. One person who changed things for tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people, and everyone who stood with her as well.

And as I explained yesterday, while this moratorium is an important safeguard to protect millions of American families in danger of evictions, it is not the only piece of the puzzle. Once the moratorium comes to an end, whenever that is, there is still the fundamental challenge of making up for a year of lost rent and lost mortgage payments.

Congress considered this problem very early this year. I pushed for—and we passed, along with Senator Brown and so many others— substantial rental and mortgage assistance in the American Rescue Plan.

Unfortunately, state governments have been really uneven about distributing that crucial assistance. A few states—the state of Illinois, the state of Texas—have done a pretty good job. But many have not. Unfortunately, one of those who has done a very poor job at distributing this money is my home state of New York.

Simply put: state governments, especially New York, must do a better job distributing the $47 billion Congress appropriated for emergency rental assistance. The money is there, but far too little has gone out the door.

In New York specifically, Congress sent more than $2 billion to help renters in New York. Inexplicably, some reports indicate that less than 0.05% of New York’s allocation had been received by tenants or landlords as of less than a week ago.

So today, I am sending a letter with colleagues in the New York delegation to the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, calling on that office to hurry up, to fix the inexcusable delays in rental assistance and immediately begin disbursing these funds.

We need to understand why New Yorkers are having such trouble navigating the process to get the money they need. There have been reports of frustrating crashes and glitches on the online application process, confusing instructions, and very little support to help the applicants, even though the money has been there for several months.

The clock is ticking to fix this mess. The state moratorium expires in less than a month, and the CDC’s moratorium will give only one more month of protection after that. New York State needs to act quickly, and we expect a response by August 9th as to how we can get a handle on these delays and most importantly, get money to New Yorkers faster so they can pay the rent.

And by the way, many landlords, particularly small landlords depend on this as well. If you worked hard—let’s say you’re a bus driver and you own a three family house—when the tenants don't pay you, you don't have any cushion and you’ve got to pay the mortgage. So this bill will help with that as well, this proposal.

Right now, there are six and a half million Americans who are behind on their rent. According to the New York Times, over 400,000 renters in New York City alone owe a collective debt of $2 billion.

Congress did its job by making sure that we’d have money in place to help these Americans avoid evictions. Now the states need to step it up to make sure that this money gets into the hands of renters as soon as possible.

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