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Between 800 and 1,110 Mainers can expect to have a large part of their rent subsidized as soon as next month as Maine launches its pilot rent relief program.
A one-time $18 million appropriation of state funding approved by the Maine Legislature and Gov. Janet Mills was used to create the first state-funded eviction prevention program, aimed at helping households that are in court facing evictions, or have received notices of evictions.
Participants will receive $800 of rental assistance every month paid directly to their landlords, or have their rent covered entirely if they’re paying less than that. That’s according to the Quality Housing Coalition, a Portland-area organization that is contracting with the Maine State Housing Authority to administer the program. Applications to the program will open at the end of this month, according to MaineHousing.
The Portland-area nonprofit previously ran an independent eviction prevention program, and currently has other housing initiatives targeting single mothers. Eviction prevention is one piece of the puzzle of combating poverty: stabilizing housing while building more supply and addressing a significant housing debt that impacts low-income families, said Victoria Morales, executive director of QHC.
“We really see this as really leveraging people’s money to use for their other needs that they normally couldn’t meet because their housing costs were so high,” Morales said.
Mainers who qualify for state’s pilot rent relief program can apply starting this month
“It really addresses the housing affordability gap, because what the market is calling for, so many folks can’t pay for.”
To be eligible for the program, applicants must make 60% of the median income in the area, which impacts renters disproportionately since homeowners on an average tend to make more money, Morales said. They also need to be paying less than 125% of the fair market rent, which varies widely across Maine by location and size of the rental unit.
After first meeting the urgent needs of those facing eviction, applicants will be evaluated on a first come, first served basis by QHC. Payments to participants’ landlords may start as soon as November, Morales said.
The program will only run for a year, but removing a significant part of the financial burden may help renters save up and be able to pay their own rent after it ends, she said.
QHC runs other programs for low-income families, including immigrant and low-income single moms across the state, providing them with direct cash assistance to be used as they see fit. From the first year of that program, which gave 20 moms $1,000 of unrestricted income per month, most people use that money to help with rent, Morales said.
Based on the lessons learned from that program, called Project HOME Trust, QHC will be preparing participants for the limited rental assistance program, and asking them to develop a plan after it ends.
“It’s not going to solve everything, but it is to keep people housed this next year,” she said. “And it’ll prevent so much crisis for individuals and children.”
Evictions are on the rise after pandemic-era dip
The program will prioritize those in immediate need of support to avoid eviction, and those who have received a notice to quit from their landlords, which is a warning that the tenant may be evicted if their lease conditions aren’t met. Most tenants in Maine are evicted because of a failure to pay rent, according to a 2023 study by Pine Tree Legal. Of the thousands of cases the legal firm examined, 25% of tenants were evicted automatically because they didn’t show up to court.
Over the past decade, eviction filings in Maine have remained somewhat steady except for the dip during the pandemic, when Maine was operating a pandemic-era emergency rental assistance program, which was federally funded. According to MaineHousing, more than $100 million in emergency relief was provided, helping more than 17,000 renters in Maine.
That program temporarily reduced eviction filings in court from 5,125 in 2019 to around 3,000 in 2020 and 2021, according to Maine Judicial Branch data, which tracks the number of cases filed, but not judgements. But after the program ended, monthly eviction cases started increasing across the state to more than 5,800 in 2023, which was the highest number in five years.
As of August 2024, 3,121 households or individuals had eviction filings in court.
When people are evicted, not only does that impact their general well-being and leave them with a stain on their record, which can make it harder to secure housing, but it also leads to them increasingly turning to other systems of support, such as shelters, or risk being policed or having to go to hospitals if their health is impacted by losing their home, Morales said.
“We focus on the human cost, but to our community who may be concerned about funding something like this, the cost that we actually spend to keep people unhoused and in a homelessness system is exorbitant,” Morales said. “The cost of eviction, even on landlords, on courts, is exorbitant. We spend a lot of money on that, and we don’t really track it or think about it, because it’s a system that’s just sort of the status quo.”
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