Federal funds for New Mexico’s Emergency Rental Assistance are slated to run out this August.
Winter Torres is the director of the New Mexico Eviction Prevention and Diversion Program, which helped get the money out across most of the state and is wrapping up this week. Torres told KUNM she sees New Mexico slipping back to pre-pandemic levels of eviction with fewer resources to keep people housed.
TORRES: What I see as the real need to continue rental assistance and eviction prevention and housing stability services, is that [Legislative Finance Committee] just put out a report, I think last month, that said, although rents have gone up 70% since 2017, wages have only gone up 15%. That just doesn't match.
We're already seeing it. Some folks have exhausted their ability to use rental assistance. There's a max of 15 months. There is a new rule that folks that are in eviction court for the second time and got an award or rental assistance the first time are not going to get one now. Now that there is such little funding left. It really hurts folks.
KUNM: Evictions are already going up. How is this change potentially going to impact that?
TORRES: We are at and around pre-pandemic levels of evictions. We completely expect that to continue to go up. It is particularly bad here in the metro area. Albuquerque and Metro Court, here, Bernalillo County Metro Court carries 70% of the state's evictions. For most of the pandemic, there were four judges handling that. Now there are only three.
The last I heard, I think last week or the week before that, the judges used to carry about 25 eviction cases per judge each week, and now they're carrying about 40 or 45 each. And they need to get through all of those. So, that shortens the time that people can tell their story -– either side, the landlord or the tenant.
KUNM: Could you give me a quick summary of what your team does?
TORRES: Right now, we sit in between the state courts and New Mexico Department of Finance and Administration. So, every day we get a feed of all the eviction cases filed in the state, and if there is not contact information in the court filings, we do our best to try and find that, but we're only successful about half of the time.
Then, we do outreach. A lot of the time we are the people telling folks that they need to be in court. So we reach out to them, we let them know that there is rental assistance available and can we help you do an application. And then we give reminders before they have to go to court as well.
KUNM: And your work is wrapping up at the end of this month, June. Is that right?
TORRES: Yes, June 30 is our last day of operation. There is funding in the New Mexico State FY 24 budget, but I can't really figure out what's going on with that. I don't know. Because there's not in particular a housing department for the state of New Mexico, my understanding is they're trying to figure out how they're going to push out the funding, so that then we could apply to do the work that we're doing.
You know, it would’ve been great if we could have just continued. Hopefully things could pick up by the late fall winter, but the gap I think is going to be–it's going to be a real problem, particularly in Metro Court.
KUNM: I've heard before that part of what makes something like this so successful is that the federal government can provide a lot more funds for something like this than the state government can. What are you hoping to see from the federal government as these pandemic relief funds wind down, but the problems are still there and potentially growing?
TORRES: This is more kind of a broad policy issue, so I think this goes for state, for feds, for local, is that the economy that we're moving into is much more information based, technology based, etc. Wealth is very highly concentrated in the 1 or 2%, and New Mexico is such a poor state. We're going to have to figure out a way to help the people that this economy is leaving behind. A place to live, it's just a basic human need for survival.
