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.”
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February 16, 2021 11 min read
Unlike other tenants, Michael Salemno, 44, of Reading, had a landlord willing to work with him to apply for the state s first batch of rent relief. But they never heard anything back. (Elizabeth Robertson/Philadelphia Inquirer)
This article is shared with LebTown by content partner Spotlight PA.
By Charlotte Keith of Spotlight PA
HARRISBURG It was late August, just past noon, and time was running out.
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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.