Nearly 60% of Mass. rental assistance applications not approved

WORCESTER, Mass. — Aditya Katheeth moved from India to Massachusetts in 2019 to earn a master’s degree in data analytics at Clark University. When the pandemic hit, he said his visa didn’t allow him to work and he had nowhere to go.

“I was anxious. I didn’t know what was going to happen next,” Katheeth said.

His roommates slowly moved out of their Maple Tree Lane apartment, leaving Katheeth unable to pay rent. He applied for financial aid through the state’s rental assistance program in 2020 and was approved. But when he applied for additional help last July, he said the state didn’t accept his second application.

“I don’t know if they’re going to respond back or if anything is going to happen with my application, so there’s a lot of uncertainty around it,” Katheeth said.

According to an affidavit filed by the Mass. Department of Housing and Community Development Chief of Programs Amy Stitely, the state received 151,658 applications for renters assistance between Nov. 2020 and Jan. 2022. The court document shows DHCD approved 58,585 applications and denied 1,107, leaving some 91,000 applications unapproved.

“It looks to us like a potentially huge problem,” said Doug Quattrochi, Katheeth’s landlord and executive director of MassLandlords.net.

Quattrochi and MassLandlords.net sued DHCD in 2021 for records pertaining to rental assistance applications. Quattrochi said he was interested to see where individuals may have fallen through the cracks. However, in response to Quattrochi’s lawsuit, Stitely’s affidavit indicated DHCD didn’t have the address information for roughly 47,000 of the 151,000 applications.

Quattrochi is concerned tens of thousands of applications may have “timed out” because of language barriers, missing documentation, or human error.

“You’ve got to recognize that folks who need rental assistance are not necessarily going to be able to jump through all the hoops that we imagine they should be able to prove that they’re worthy,” Quattrochi said. “If somebody applies in Vietnamese, Cambodian or Russian, your message to them asking for more documentation has to be in that same language.”

DHCD dispersed $460.8 million out of around $1 billion in state and federal rental assistance to 61,142 Massachusetts households between Jan. 1, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2021, according to the Eviction Diversion Initiative Dashboard. A DHCH spokesperson did not provide Boston 25 News with a comment.

“We’re just asking for some public oversight so we can go back and make things right. We’re not trying to say anybody has done a bad job or had bad intentions. But we do have systemic problems and we’re just trying to fix them,” Quattrochi said.

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