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Pennsylvania State Senate
04/24/2024 07:22 PM
Pennsylvania State Senate
https://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/Legis/CSM/showMemoPublic.cfm?chamber=S&SPick=20210&cosponId=36709
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Senate of Pennsylvania
Session of 2021 - 2022 Regular Session

MEMORANDUM

Posted: January 13, 2022 03:28 PM
From: Senator Vincent J. Hughes and Sen. Nikil Saval, Sen. Art Haywood
To: All Senate members
Subject: Allocating American Rescue Plan dollars for additional rental assistance
 
In the near future, we plan on introducing legislation to allocate $500 million of the Commonwealth’s remaining American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds to provide additional assistance for the Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP).

Congress made $25 billion available for ERAP through the Consolidated Statute of 2020 and an additional $21.550 billion through ARP for communities across the nation to provide rental assistance for those who fell behind as a result of COVID.  The Commonwealth and several communities received more than $847.688 million from the Consolidated Statute and more than $552.345 million through the ARP for rental assistance through the Consolidated Statute.

According to data available from DHS, 179,915 applications have been received by counties across the Commonwealth.  Counties, such as Delaware, Philadelphia and Berks, have applications they have received that they are unable to fund. We believe no application received while a program was open should be turned away simply because of lack of funding; therefore, we are proposing utilizing $500 million of ARP dollars for distribution to counties that have spent all of their funds and have remaining applications they are unable to fund.

Unfortunately, the needs of many residents of the Commonwealth are outpacing the available funding.  For example, Philadelphia shut down applications for their ERAP on Friday, January 7, 2022.  Based off information provided from Philadelphia, they estimate 53,2000 applications are in their system and are unable to be funded due to lack of funds. Regrettably, Philadelphia is not the first county to shut down their program because the demand far exceeded available dollars.  Due to extremely high demand Berks County shut down their program in 2021.

We hope you will join us in sponsoring this legislation to provide much needed assistance to renters in this Commonwealth. 


Introduced as SB1059