Moments after Daniris Espinal walked into her new apartment in Brooklyn, she prayed. In ensuing nights, she would awaken and touch the walls for reassurance — finding in them a relief that turned to tears over her morning coffee.
Those walls were possible through a federal program that pays rent for some 60,000 families and individuals fleeing homelessness or domestic violence. Espinal was fleeing both.
But the program, Emergency Housing Vouchers, is running out of money — and quickly.
Funding is expected to be used up by the end of next year, according to a letter from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and obtained by The Associated Press. That would leave tens of thousands across the country scrambling to pay their rent.
It would be among the largest one-time losses of rental assistance in the U.S., analysts say, and the ensuing evictions could churn these people — after several years of rebuilding their lives — back onto the street or back into abusive relationships.
“To have it stop would completely upend all the progress that they’ve made,” said Sonya Acosta, policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which researches housing assistance.
“And then you multiply that by 59,000 households,” she said.
The program, launched in 2021 by then-President Joe Biden as part of the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act, was allocated $5 billion to help pull people out of homelessness, domestic violence and human trafficking.
People from San Francisco to Dallas to Tallahassee, Florida, were enrolled — among them children, seniors and veterans — with the expectation that funding would last until the end of the decade.
But with the ballooning cost of rent, that $5 billion will end far faster.
Last month, HUD sent letters to groups dispersing the money, advising them to “manage your EHV program with the expectation that no additional funding from HUD will be forthcoming.”
The program’s future rests with Congress, which could decide to add money as it crafts the federal budget. But it’s a relatively expensive prospect at a time when Republicans, who control Congress, are dead set on cutting federal spending to afford tax cuts.
Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, who championed the program four years ago, is pushing for another $8 billion infusion.
But the organizations lobbying Republican and Democratic lawmakers to reup the funding told the AP they aren’t optimistic. Four GOP lawmakers who oversee the budget negotiations did not respond to AP requests for comment.
“We’ve been told it’s very much going to be an uphill fight,” said Kim Johnson, the public policy manager at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Espinal and her two daughters, aged 4 and 19, are living on one of those vouchers in a three-bedroom apartment with an over $3,000 monthly rent — an amount extremely difficult to cover without the voucher.
Four years ago, Espinal fought her way out of a marriage where her husband controlled her decisions, from seeing her family and friends to leaving the apartment to go shopping. When she spoke up, her husband said she was wrong, or in the wrong or crazy.
Isolated and in the haze of postpartum depression, she didn’t know what to believe. “Every day, little by little, I started to feel not like myself,” she said. “It felt like my mind wasn’t mine.”
When notices arrived in March 2021 seeking about $12,000 in back rent, it was a shock. Espinal had quit her job at her husband’s urging and he had promised to cover family expenses.
Police reports documenting her husband’s bursts of anger were enough for a judge to give her custody of their daughter in 2022, Espinal said.
But her future was precarious: She was alone, owed thousands of dollars in back rent and had no income to pay it or support her newborn and teenage daughters.
Financial aid to prevent evictions during the pandemic kept Espinal afloat, paying her back rent and keeping the family out of shelters. But it had an expiration date.
Around that time, the Emergency Housing Vouchers program was rolled out, targeting people in Espinal’s situation.
