The inside story of how Pennsylvania failed to deliver millions in coronavirus rent relief

HARRISBURG — It was late August, just past noon, and time was running out.

Bryce Maretzki was in charge of a $150 million effort to keep Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable tenants in their homes.

By now, the problems he had predicted, weeks earlier, were undeniable. There was too much red tape. The money was barely moving. Phone calls and emails from desperate tenants were flooding in and the program that was meant to save them was a mess.

It was a mess that Maretzki, a senior official at the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, had to make the best of — even as he vented to a colleague, that afternoon, that the program “continues to reveal new levels of dysfunction … like that long, lost, alcoholic uncle.”

Pennsylvania’s first effort to help renters was doomed from the start, according to a Spotlight PA review of thousands of emails obtained under the state Right-To-Know Law. Housing officials were not consulted on the details and warned of serious problems before it launched, but their pleas for help never resulted in the changes they said were needed.

Read more: https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2021/02/pa-rent-relief-program-deadline-application-failure-landlord-tenant/