Maine Equal Justice testifies in support of LD 1695, a bill to improve General Assistance (GA)
On May 12th, Deb Ibonwa, Policy and Legal Advocate for Maine Equal Justice, offered this testimony to the Committee on Health and Human Services.
Maine Equal Justice supports LD 1695 as a first step toward strengthening General Assistance (GA), which has for years now become one of the primary housing resources for so many Mainers, especially during the COVID pandemic, in addressing racial disparities represented in our homeless population, and one important way of recognizing and tackling our housing crisis as a public health emergency. In fact, approximately 80% of general assistance expenditures are for housing assistance.
What LD 1695 Does
LD 1695 makes the administration of rental assistance through GA more stable and helps people obtain other types of rental assistance when their income increases. It expands who is presumptively eligible for GA, ensures that GA rental assistance recipients who receive help for 30 days or more be prioritized for housing vouchers, allows applicants to remain eligible for other basic necessities through GA if the amount of GA paid for housing reaches the maximum amount allowed under an ordinance, and provides for 100% reimbursement to towns and tribes for assistance provided to residents of emergency shelters.
Why Maine Equal Justice Supports LD 1695
Maine Equal Justice supports this bill because it will help provide critically needed housing assistance to Maine’s most vulnerable residents and make the GA program more reliable. In fact, we have heard personally from providers of Low Income Tax Credit units that the current model of GA is not a reliable enough source of income for someone to be considered for those units.
Low-Income Tenants Are Highly Vulnerable to Eviction
Even before the pandemic, Maine’s rental housing market has been among the least affordable in the nation, and our state has not done enough to protect people who are being priced out of their homes. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities data from 2019, 2 in 10 Mainers with low incomes are either homeless or pay over half their income on rent. While rental costs have risen across the state, wages haven’t kept pace. The pandemic has pushed Maine’s housing affordability problems to a crisis point, showing us how vulnerable our state is to a wave of evictions: the number of Maine households that have fallen behind on rent and face eviction has risen to at least 20,000.
One tenant from Winslow describes the impossible bind renters are in to balance the cost of housing with their other basic needs, especially during the pandemic when stability at home has made the difference for being able to work from home and keep one’s job, or not:
The biggest fear for me and many others is debt. Poor people all over the state are plunging deeper into debt to keep afloat so they don’t become homeless. Those stories you hear about people not being able to afford a $400 emergency? For many it’s much worse than that. For me it’s keeping up with car payments. I had to push off my car payment for two months in order to make rent. I’m paying a lot of interest in order to make sure I don’t lose my housing. This is the bind that so many families find themselves in: we need our cars for when we go back to work but keeping up with payments in this emergency in addition to all the other needs our family have is near impossible.
For severely rent burdened households, missing any one of these bills can lead to eviction. The Maine Affordable Housing Coalition 2020 study on Maine’s eviction filings found that 46% of tenants who are evicted for non-payment are brought to court after missing just one month’s payment or less.3
With so many severely rent burdened households throughout the State, Maine suffers from a longstanding eviction pandemic that preceded the COVID-19 pandemic.
Maine’s Housing Crisis Highlights Deep Racial Inequality
While housing instability and eviction is always tragic, it is not a tragedy that befalls all families equally. Though Maine does not have a centralized database for evictions in the state, data from Maine State Housing Authority has shown that 26% of Maine’s homeless population on any given night is Black or African American, though only 1.4% of Maine’s population is Black or African American.4 Pine Tree Legal Assistance has also provided statistics that 12% of households they represented in eviction court were non-white, though only 5% of Maine’s population is non-white. This reflects national data evidencing extreme racial disparities in evictions across the country; myriad studies have shown that Black women are the most likely tenants to be subject to eviction in the U.S. even when studies control for poverty.5 Maine’s housing market is no exception.
Why General Assistance is so Important
General Assistance is the only source of rental assistance that many families are eligible for and it is the only housing program that does not have a waiting list. This bill is an important step to ensure that Maine’s most vulnerable residents receives the help they need from Maine’s safety net programs and come up with solutions that don’t leave anyone out, as has happened to many during this pandemic. If any of us are left without safety nets, then we only worsen the public health crisis and put all of us in more danger.
While this bill is not the answer to everything, it is a critical first step in establishing security and reliability of a major rental assistance program in our State for families of low income. For these reasons, MEJ strongly urges the committee to pass LD 1695.
- 3 MAHC, supra note 9, at 9.
- 4 Maine State Housing Authority, Maine Homelessness Survey: 2019 Point in Time Count (May 17, 2019), https://www.mainehousing.org/docs/default-source/housing-reports/2019-point-in-time-survey.pdf?sfvrsn=6d6fb415_4.
- 5 For extensive research on this topic, see Matt Desmond’s Pulitzer Prize winning work Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016), which Desmond has further documented in Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty, 118 Am. J. of Sociology 1, 88-133 (July 2012), and at the Eviction Lab at Princeton University (https://evictionlab.org/).
