RAFT Eligibility Changes

RAFT Eligibility Changes

Resource Person:

Douglas Quattrochi - Doug

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Our business update for today is about the RAFT Program and Eligibility Changes to that.

I hope you know that RAFT is the Residential Assistance for Families in Transition Rental Assistance Program, the main pandemic response that we’ve had over the last two years. At one time with federal funding, RAFT provided 18 months of rental assistance, which was a huge amount, but of course before the pandemic, RAFT was a state-funded program and provided at most $7,000 per application, and that’s basically where we landed again after the pandemic until the legislature enacted a new fiscal year budget and increased that RAFT amount by almost 50 percent up to $10,000 again.

However, you’ll see the combination of new law and new regulation now requires all RAFT applicants to have been served a notice to quit, so whereas during the pandemic, RAFT was a diversionary program designed to keep people out of housing court. Now basically the program is saying, “If you’re serious about getting rental assistance, you have to be headed to court anyways.” That’s obviously not desirable.

Another not desirable aspect of the RAFT application process is that they will likely lose the document you submit and you’ll have to upload them many times. As a matter of fact, we’re working the whole sub-city administrators and the Department of Housing and Community Development accountable through our litigation. We sued them in December 2021 for access to oversight records and basically they don’t have them. They have not collected these application records where they should have.

That litigation is ongoing, and you can read about it on your site, but basically remember that it if you are with a household that doesn’t have enough money to pay rent, it is possible to get rental assistance still. You might be able to get up to $10,000, but you do have to be headed to court and using that as an alternative resolution besides just waiting for the rental assistance.

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