Yellen urges states to speed up rental assistance funds, avert evictions

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Wednesday urged state and local governments to act swiftly to expedite emergency rental assistance funds to renters and landlords in need, warning of the lasting negative impact of evictions.

Yellen said the federal government was doing "everything we can" to speed the delivery of such payments, warning that millions of Americans face possible evictions after the Supreme Court two weeks ago struck down a national moratorium imposed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

She said a rental assistance program is starting to reach scale, with some $5 billion in aid distributed through July 31.

"It's welcome progress, but we know it's not enough. Too many renters and landlords are stuck in limbo," she said, adding that hundreds of thousands of applications for rental aid are awaiting payment.

White House adviser Gene Sperling cautioned that without a rapid acceleration of efforts by state and local governments to reach renters in need, there will be a "meaningful gap" in aid for hundreds of thousands of families.

"We need to have at least $16 billion out in the next couple of months, but if we continue on our current pace, we will be at just over half of that," he said.

Many cities, counties and states run by Democrats have executed their rental assistance programs effectively, with 22 jurisdictions having disbursed 85% of their funds by the end of July, Sperling said.

Yellen repeated the Treasury's warning that the department will begin to reallocate funds from jurisdictions that do not have working assistance programs by the end of September to communities that do have effective programs.

Louisville, Kentucky, Mayor Greg Fischer said his city has distributed 90% of its allocated funds already, through a combination of partnerships with the state government, the local court system and non-profit agencies that created a single application portal, https://stopmyeviction.org, and hired temporary employees and interns to handle applications.

Fischer said the city's success in distributing funds has been due in part to Treasury's acceptance of renters self-certification of their income situation without extensive documentation requirements.

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Louisville authorities have sometimes accepted just two pay stubs, or proxy documents from which prior cash income could be extrapolated.