AURORA | While federal rental assistance continues to merely trickle into Americans’ bank accounts as the threat of eviction surges, officials with the City of Aurora and Arapahoe County are doling out dollars at rates several fold higher than the state.
Aurora’s largest county has been issuing as much at $175,000 in rental assistance each week this summer, totaling some $6.5 million of injections since February, according to County Spokesperson Luc Hatlestad.
“Arapahoe County programs … are getting this aid out the door more efficiently than the broader trends indicate,” Hatlestad wrote in an email earlier this week.
The county has pushed out about 35% of its total COVID-related assistance funds in the past eight months, dwarfing the national figures that show just 11% of the some $46.5 billion in approved funds across the country have made it into tenants’ hands.
The City of Aurora, which has its own pot of rental assistance funds, has awarded about 46% of the $11.4 million in aid its had available since the end of January, according to city spokesperson Michael Bryant.
In Colorado, just more than 7% of relief dollars have been issued, prompting the state to switch payment vendors earlier this summer in an effort to speed up the process, according to reporting from The Colorado Sun that cited data from the U.S. Department of Treasury.
Renewed efforts to distribute the rental payments are being ignited after the U.S. Supreme Court late last month killed President Joe Biden’s latest eviction moratorium, potentially prompting droves of people to be driven from their dwellings.
Arapahoe County Sheriff’s deputies executed 759 evictions in the first six months of the year, compared to 264 such orders carried out over the same time last year, according to Ginger Delgado, a spokesperson for the sheriff’s office.
The evictions that were executed technically didn’t fall under the standing moratoria, according to Delgado.
“The evictions that were executed were not covered by the federal orders typically because the eviction was either not related to non-payment or perhaps the tenant didn’t take the proper steps,” she wrote in an email. “We only received evictions from the courts that did not apply to the government moratorium.”
April and May 2020 were the only months in the past two years in which deputies carried out zero eviction orders, data show.
In Adams County, deputies had completed 275 annual eviction orders as of the beginning of August, according to a spokesperson for the Adams County Sheriff’s Office.
Aurora residents are eligible to apply for rental assistance through Arapahoe County, though officials are encouraging Aurorans to apply directly through the city to try to save funds for other, smaller towns that don’t offer municipal assistance.
The City of Aurora’s assistance funds are still available for those who qualify. The primary qualifications are: a provable loss of income directly spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, and a total household income below 80% of the regional median. For a single person, the income threshold is $54,950, and for a family of four, the limit is $78,500.
A total of 776 Aurora households have received assistance funds since the start of the pandemic, according to the city.
About $9 million in additional federal rental assistance money is still coming down the municipal pike, according to Bryant with the city. Some $2.1 million in aid raised through other means, including marijuana taxes, has been disbursed since the onset of the global health crisis.
Residents who received previous rental assistance are eligible for additional funding, and proof of citizenship is not required to apply. Applications can be submitted by visiting auroragov.org/rentassist.
Anyone seeking to apply for funds through Arapahoe County must meet largely identical requirements, though residents must provide a copy of an eviction notice if they are being ousted for failing to pay rent. Residents can email housingassistance@arapahoegov.com or call 303-738-7891 for county-specific information.