Livia Fernandez used the commute to get from her Bronx apartment to Queens to work as a cook at an Ecuadorean restaurant. She earned $700 per week. The restaurant closed down last year after the pandemic in New York City. Fernandez lost her job.
Ms. Fernandez was infected with Covid-19 in March 2020. Since then, she has been feeling weak and unable work. Her two young children were also infected. For 20 months, Ms. Fernandez has not paid her $1,400 rent — she owes more than $28,000.
Her landlord has yet not to demand payment. Instead, she hoped that Ms. Fernandez would be eligible under a state-run pandemic relief program. Ms. Fernandez is aware that her housing situation has become precarious, as the rent relief program is almost out of funds.
“Where will I go with two daughters?” Ms. Fernandez said. “I can’t live in the streets. ”
Millions of Americans are now without jobs and at risk of losing their homes due to the pandemic. But few places better illustrate the escalating housing crisis than the Bronx, where working-class residents have long struggled to afford the city’s rising cost of living. Before the pandemic, more that one-third of Bronx households spent at least half of their income on rent.
Since the pandemic, more than 26,000 renters have been sued by their landlords in the borough. This is the highest concentration in New York State and more than many large American cities such as Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. According to the Princeton University Eviction Lab. A state moratorium on evictions — one of the strongest in the nation — has helped keep the number of cases from being even higher; they are far below prepandemic levels.
Although most lawsuits do not result in actual evictions (although many do), the mere filing of a complaint can place a renter onto a “tenant blacklist”, making it harder to find and qualify to rent another apartment.
Many residents, including Ms. Fernandez remain unemployed and unable to rent. In September, the Bronx’s unemployment rate of 12.4 percent was almost triple that of the national average.
According to the most current data, the borough has received more than $248 Million in pandemic relief for renters. This is more than the entire state of Indiana, Arizona, or Connecticut combined. The state has become so overwhelmed by requests for help that it has stopped accepting new applications. According to the most recent data, more than 70,000 pending applicants could be left without federal funds.
Interviews with tenants and landlords paint a grim picture of a borough in crisis, where the housing crisis strains economic recovery.
Those who were unable to receive or qualify rent relief because they didn’t submit an applicant or didn’t meet the criteria could face eviction after the January moratorium expires. Others will have to work for years to get out of debt. Without rental income, property owners can let their buildings fall into ruin.
“I’m very concerned about the long-term impact of such a momentous event,” said Matthew Murphy, the executive director of the New York University Furman Center.
A cook who isn’t working worries about her daughters
Ms. Fernandez started her career as a chef three years ago when she moved from Guayaquil in Ecuador.
She has been struggling to find work since she lost her job. She received Covid-19 again in March, and has been unable for long periods of standing. “I can’t find a full-time job because I feel physically weak,’’ she said.
She is often unable to afford food, so she sometimes receives help from a local church pantry. Clara and Marta are her two daughters.
“I can go hungry,” she said, “but they can’t. I do nails, clean apartments, anything.”
She applied for the rent relief program after her landlord in Mott Haven pushed her. She claimed she hadn’t been notified that her application was being reviewed.
“I break down and start crying,” she said. “But then I control myself because who will take care of my daughters if I’m not around?”
Her landlord, Inocencio González, could not be reached for comment.
Ms. Fernandez, who is without a job, is anxious about the future.
“Thank God my landlord hasn’t been pushing or bothering with the rent money, but months keep passing and my pressure has gone up a lot,” she said.
Social worker owes back rent of more than $40,000
Mercedes Escoto (63), has not paid rent in her two-bedroom apartment in High Bridge since April 2020. According to a letter she received from her landlord, her unpaid rent was over $43,000 as of October. In May, her landlord filed court papers requesting her eviction.
Her troubles began long before the pandemic.
Five years ago, her landlord increased her monthly rent from $1.400 to $2,000 abruptly. The rent would have claimed almost half her income — Ms. Escoto earns around $59,000 a year as a social worker and also takes care of her mother, who lives with her.
“I told them from the get go, I could not pay all of that,” she said.
She was unable to pay the rent increase so she fell behind. She borrowed money from a city emergency assistance program and took roughly $11,000 out of her retirement account for back rent — money she is still paying back.
The pandemic worsened Ms. Escoto’s financial woes. Her mother received Covid-19 in March 2020. She is now dependent on a walker, oxygen, and pain pills. Ms. Escoto was forced to take several weeks off work without pay. She was plagued by anxiety and depression.
“I used to cry every day,” she said. “It was too much for me.”
She also claimed that she has had a leaky ceiling in her bathroom and a non-functional oven. These are two issues that are common in rent stabilized buildings like hers. Unlike the city’s other four boroughs, the Bronx has many more rent-stabilized units than unregulated apartments.
She stated that even if she could afford the rent, she would be reluctant to do so until the repairs have been completed, especially since the moratorium on evictions has prevented her case from moving forward. Ms. Escoto also applied for rent relief.
The landlord, a limited liability corporation associated with Isaac Kassirer that has attracted national attention for its efforts to gentrify affordable homes, filed papers last year to deregulate it so it can charge higher rents.
In an emailed statement, Todd Rothenberg, a lawyer representing the landlord, said Ms. Escoto “has not paid a single penny in 21 months” while the landlord “has to pay me, his property taxes, his mortgage, the heating, the hot water etc., without any income whatsoever by Ms. Escoto.”
He noted that the landlord had agreed to charge Ms. Escoto a lower rent — around $1,500 — in October 2020. It was not clear why she was still receiving bills for a higher amount.
We’re not bloodsuckers, a real estate executive says
OneSource Property Management submitted 70 of the eviction cases in Bronx between March 2020 and March 2020. OneSource Property Management is a real estate company that manages 25 apartments in the borough.
In the months after the pandemic arrived in New York, rent collections dropped by 40 percent across the company’s properties, said Valentina Gojcaj, an executive at OneSource.
Ms. Gojcaj claimed that her company had filed eviction proceedings in August 2020. They believed they would be able to help her tenants qualify for financial aid. The moratorium put the cases on hold and rent continued to be unpaid.
Ms. Gojcaj explained that due to the decline in rental revenue, the company began to dip into the savings it had set aside for large capital expenses like new boilers. It has been made worse, she added, with the rising cost of operating the company’s buildings, notably a $160,000 increase from last year in expected heating costs.
By June 2021, the arrears had climbed to nearly $800,000, she said, and she sought help through the state’s pandemic rental aid program.
It was a nightmare. It was nearly impossible to keep track of each applicant’s statuses because each one had to be submitted separately. Each case required information from tenants. She said that only 20 renters responded.
While she did receive emergency assistance through the state’s program for those 20 renters, she said she is still out hundreds of thousands of dollars.
“We’re being told that we are such bad people, that we are bloodsuckers,” Ms. Gojcaj said. “We are doing the best that you can just like everyone else, trying to make things work and being beat up on unfairly.”
The cab driver and cleaner struggle to catch up
Diana Mendez, a cleaner and her husband, a taxi driver paid $1,800 for a two bedroom apartment on the Grand Concourse, Bronx. They live there with their five children. Ms. Mendez stated that she lost almost 90% of her work after the pandemic. Her husband also lost customers.
They managed to find the rent money for months. Then, in October of last years, they began to fall behind. Their landlord had filed a lawsuit to evict them. They owed them $10,700 by May.
“This has really affected us and our community, we’re poor people and are the ones that have been the most affected by this,” Ms. Mendez said.
Ms. Mendez explained that they were able slowly to repay the money through a city program that provided $1,700 each month. She said that they were able find more work, but not enough to stabilize the finances.
“If it wasn’t for public assistance, we wouldn’t have been able to pay rent and would have gotten evicted,” Ms. Mendez said.
She stated that the aid will be ending in a month. She is not sure how the couple will continue their apartment-rental payments.
Source: NY Times