Making the rent

In 1971, one of Arthur Winn’s first projects as founder of WinnCompanies, which today is the largest operator of affordable housing in Massachusetts, was Coes Pond Village in Worcester.

“It is proudly still one of our flagship developments,” WinnCompanies executive vice president Michael O’Brien said.

Across the state, WinnCompanies owns and manages more than 6,500 apartments in 51 buildings. In addition to Coes Pond Village, WinnCompanies owns and manages three other residential properties in Worcester: Voke Lofts, Wellington Community and Canal Lofts. WinnCompanies also manages the Matheson Apartments on Main Street.

Last week, WinnCompanies announced it was extending its moratorium on tenant evictions for financial hardship through the end of the year at Winn-owned communities.

The state’s eviction and foreclosure moratorium, which went into effect April 20 and is set to expire Aug. 18 or 45 days after Gov. Charlie Baker lifts the COVID-19 state of emergency, whichever is earlier.

WinnCompanies’ extension will apply to all residents financially impacted by COVID-19 who are eligible under the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development’s COVID-19 moratorium guidelines issued in April. All residents experiencing virus-related financial hardships will be required to document and certify their financial hardship and to enter into a payment plan agreement based on their rent obligation and individual household situation.

The four residential properties WinnCompanies owns and manages in Worcester include 569 apartment units and house an estimated 1,500 individuals.

“For us, we recognize that we’re in unique and challenging times,” said O’Brien, who, prior to joining Winn, served as Worcester city manager for nine years, “and we also take our responsibility to our residents very seriously. You put those two qualities together and we knew we had to think boldly and act because our residents, no different from the rest of the world, are feeling the strain of the COVID-19 impacts. For us, it was something we knew we had to do and to give our residents who we genuinely care about assurances – ‘Work with us and side by side we’ll get through this.’”

According to the MassINC Polling Group, from April to June, 29% of renters in Massachusetts missed paying at least some rent.

On July 1, the Baker administration announced a new $20 million fund, the Emergency Rental and Mortgage Assistance program, to assist low-income households having trouble making rent and mortgage payments. The program will provide direct funding to eligible households that have suffered financial hardship during the state of emergency put in place during the coronavirus crisis.

The Massachusetts Housing Court has estimated 20,000 eviction cases will be filed when the moratorium ends next month. From March 18-July 8, 124 summary process cases were filed in Central Housing Court, which serves Worcester and surrounding towns. The state eviction moratorium began April 20, and since then there were 13 filings through July 8 in Central Housing Court.

On June 30, lawmakers filed a bill to impose a moratorium on evictions and moratoriums for failure to pay until one year after Gov. Baker lifts the public health emergency. To help property owners and landlords with 15 or fewer units, the bill would also create a state fund that would offer aid to those who were unable to pay housing costs due to the pandemic.

“Bill HD.5166 is an act to guarantee housing stability (during the COVID-19 emergency and recovery),” said Andrea Park, a housing and homelessness staff attorney at Mass. Law Reform Institute and previously a staff attorney at Community Legal Aid in Worcester, who worked on the bill. “In recognizing the recovery period will be long, it’s really about keeping people stabilized as they try to put their lives back together. What it does primarily is protect people who have been affected, whose income has been affected by this crisis. I’ve already seen an article that says it allows you to cancel rent, which is absolutely not true. It does not excuse anyone from paying rent. What it does is it removes the legal possibility that you could be put out of your home for that money.”

Through her work with City Life/Vita Urbana, a tenant organizing group in Boston, Park hears from concerned tenants every day.

“At the beginning of the crisis, we set up a hotline for people who were facing instability,” Park said, “and people started calling, ‘I’m out of work, I tried to call my landlord, they said they have to pay their mortgage.’ People were absolutely panicked. We think there were 4-5,000 eviction cases pending that were somewhere in the process when everything got suspended. Housing courts said they expect something like 20,000 evictions to be filed (when the moratorium ends), but I don’t think we really know. There are many, many, many people who are in anguish.”

Park said the hope is the fund to help owners and landlords could be established quickly.

“I think it’s much less of a landlord vs. tenant issue than it is a national recovery,” Park said. “Everyone is suffering and everyone is paying a price.”

Last month, a MassLandlords survey of members revealed that about 19% of rents went unpaid in March, April and May.

“Our position on this bill (HD.5166) is that it’s an existential threat to many of our member businesses,” said Douglas Quattrochi, executive director of MassLandlords. “This is a real serious problem. It doesn’t make any sense how they’re expecting landlords to provide housing 12 months after the state of emergency ends, which itself could be years from now depending on when we get a vaccine or full containment of the virus. The fund they’ve created is a placeholder. There is no money behind it and it doesn’t even apply to all the landlords who are impacted.”

Quattrochi said his “mom and pop” landlords are in a different financial position than a large company like WinnCompanies, and many of their tenants work or worked in hard-hit industries.

“We have a lot of folks renting (to) the food services niche or the entertainment niche,” Quattrochi said. “We’ve got a three-decker in the middle of the commonwealth somewhere. There’s no project-based subsidy. No one is working from home there. We have many members who have 100 percent non-payment over many, many units because that’s the niche they serve.”

MassLandlords is advocating for funding, Quattrochi said, and the group held a webinar last week to unveil its 32-page educational resource and bill text for a “Fair and Equal Housing Guarantee via Surety Bonds,” a policy that would guarantee rental housing during the pandemic and simultaneously address the housing crisis.

“As a landlord,” Quattrochi said, “you have to talk to your representative or senator and show an alternative to HD.5166 because the pressure from renter advocates is legitimate. There is going to be a huge housing instability problem if the legislature doesn’t take action, but just because there is this definite problem doesn’t mean we have to go off and do this half-baked idea like rent cancellation. We’ve got a way to fund it and provide this guarantee short term and fund it long term without bankrupting the commonwealth. A lot of work has been done on our end to provide an alternative.”