Marin Housing Authority: Unpaid rent total at $276K

The agency said it has whittled down the outstanding balance but 133 households remain in arrears.

The Marin Housing Authority is continuing to struggle to collect unpaid rent from a significant number of tenants.

“We have taken proactive measures to address outstanding balances for 133 families that have delinquencies,” Antoinette Terrell, the agency’s director of asset management, told the authority’s board on Tuesday. “This includes issuing 30-day notices to pay or quit and sending balance-due letters.”

The tenants sent notices have been given 30 days to pay their back rent or enter into a repayment agreement. Otherwise, the housing authority will have the option of taking them to court and possibly evicting them.

Terrell said the authority is connecting the families with community resources to help them pay their back rent and offering them flexible repayment schedules as well. She said the agency has already negotiated repayment agreements with 24 other families who were behind in paying their rent.

There was no discussion of the back rent owed by the commissioners or the public at the board meeting. Following the meeting, Kimberly Carroll, the authority’s executive director, said the unpaid rent totals $276,000.

Carroll first announced that the authority planned to issue pay-or-quit notices to some tenants in October 2023. At that time, she said the authority was owed a total of $326,000.

Terrell said the authority used a phased approach, first issuing pay-or-quit notices to families that owed $10,000 or more, then to families that owed $5,000 or more and then to families that owed $2,000 or more.

“The 133 families encompasses everyone that has a past due on their ledgers,” Terrell said.

In February, Carroll said the authority had issued 54 pay-or-quit notices and collected $97,000 in back rent.

Carroll said that despite the fact that the 30-day pay-or-quit notices were issued in November, no authority tenant has been evicted so far.

“We’re doing everything that we can to ensure that our residents stay housed,” Terrell said, “because we don’t want to add to the homeless population that is already out in the community.”

Carroll said the authority is also checking to ensure that tenants weren’t charged more in rent then they should have been. Public housing tenants are not required to pay more than 30% of their income for rent. If they have no income, no rent is required.

However, tenants are required to notify the authority if their circumstances change, or their income suddenly drops. That doesn’t always happen.

Carroll sees a connection between the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown and the large number of tenants who owe back rent.

In March 2020, Marin County supervisors enacted a moratorium on the eviction of renters that was soon superseded by a state moratorium. The bans on evictions lasted many months.

Also, Marin County distributed more than $35 million in federal funds to provide rental assistance to residents, most of it for people affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“People sort of thought they didn’t have to pay rent,” Carroll said.

Carroll said that eventually she might have to begin the legal eviction process with tenants who continue to ignore the authority’s notices or refuse to enter into a repayment agreement.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development does not allow the authority to write off unpaid rent.

The department makes no exceptions, Carroll said.

“You’ve got to pay your rent,” she said.

But while the Marin Housing Authority has hesitated to take legal action to evict its tenants, other Marin landlords have not.

“We are really inundated with evictions right now,” said Lucie Hollingsworth, an attorney at Legal Aid of Marin. “Low-income tenants are really suffering.”

Hollingsworth said that during the height of the pandemic there was a lot of public concern about a potential tsunami of evictions.

“That inspired a lot of protections then,” Hollingsworth said. “But now the tsunami is actually here, and you don’t hear about it.”

Hollingsworth complimented the Marin Housing Authority for the flexibility it has shown in working with tenants who are behind on their rent.

“I definitely appreciate how they addressed that group of residents,” she said. “We haven’t seen any evictions come from Golden Gate Village for a really long time.”