Moments after Daniris Espinal entered her new apartment in Brooklyn, she prayed. On the following nights, he would wake up and play the walls to reassure him, finding in them a relief that became tears about his morning coffee.
These walls were possible through a federal program that pays the rent for some 60,000 families and individuals fleeing the lack of housing or domestic violence. Espinal was fleeing both.
But the program, emergency housing coupons, is running out of money, and quickly.
The funds are expected to be used at the end of next year, according to a letter from the Department of Housing and Urban Development of the United States and obtained by Associated Press. That would leave tens of thousands throughout the country fighting to pay their rent.
They would be among the greatest unique losses of rent assistance in the United States, analysts say, and the resulting evictions could shake these people, after several years of rebuilding their lives, back to the street or back to abusive relations.
“Getting completely stopping all the progress they have achieved,” said Sonya Acosta, a policy analyst at the Budget Priorities Center and Policies, investigating housing assistance.
“And then you multiply that for 59,000 homes,” he said.
The program, launched in 2021 by the then President Joe Biden as part of the Law of the American Rescue Plan of the Pandemia era, was assigned for $ 5 billion to help take people out of the lack of housing, domestic violence and human trafficking.
People from San Francisco to Dallas to Tallahassee, Florida, were registered, including children, older people and veterans, with the expectation that financing would last until the end of the decade.
But with the balloon rental, those $ 5 billion will end much faster.
Last month, HUD sent letters to groups that disperse the money, advising them to “manage their EHV program with the expectation that no additional HUD funds will be presented.”
The future of the program falls to Congress, which could decide to add money as the federal budget elaborates. But it is a relatively expensive perspective at a time when Republicans, who control Congress, are dead to reduce federal expenditure to pay tax cuts.
The Democratic representative Maxine Waters, who defended the program four years ago, is pressing for another infusion of $ 8 billion.
But organizations that press Republican and Democratic legislators to relocate the funds told the AP that they are not optimistic. Four legislators of the Republican Party who supervise the budget negotiations did not respond to AP comments requests.
“We have been told that it will be a uphill,” said Kim Johnson, public policy manager of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Espinal and his two daughters, 4 and 19, live in one of those coupons in a three bedroom apartment with a monthly rental of more than $ 3,000, an extremely difficult amount to cover without the coupon.
Four years ago, Espinal fought against a marriage where her husband controlled her decisions, from seeing her family and friends until leaving the apartment to go shopping.
When she spoke, her husband said she was wrong, or in evil or crazy.
Isolated and in postpartum depression fog, I didn’t know what to believe. “Every day, little by little, I began to feel like me,” he said. “I felt that my mind was not mine.”
When the notices arrived in March 2021 in search of around $ 12,000 for rear rent, it was a shock. Espinal had renounced his work at the request of her husband and had promised to cover family expenses.
The police reports that document the explosions of her husband were enough for a judge to give her daughter’s custody in 2022, said Espinal.
But his future was precarious: he was alone, he owed thousands of dollars in the rear rent and had no income to pay or support his newborn and adolescents.
Financial aid to prevent evictions during the pandemic kept afloat, paying their rental for their backs and keeping the family out of the shelters. But it had an expiration date.
Around that time, the emergency housing coupons program was implemented, aimed at people in the spinal situation.
A “main cause of the lack of family housing is domestic violence” in New York City, said Gina Cappuccitti, director of access to housing and stability services in New Destiny Housing, a non -profit organization that has connected 700 survivors of domestic violence with the coupon program.
Espinal was one of those 700 and moved to his department of Brooklyn in 2023.
Relief went beyond finding a safe place to live, he said. “I get my value, my sense of peace, and I could rebuild my identity.”
Now, he said, he is leaving aside the money in case of the worst. Because, “that is my fear, losing control of everything for what I have worked so hard.”
