The inside story of how Pennsylvania failed to deliver millions in coronavirus rent relief Editor s Note 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.
Coronavirus Coverage 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.”
WHYY
By
Charlotte Keith, Spotlight PAFebruary 15, 2021
Unlike other tenants, Michael Salemno, 44, of Reading, Pa., had a landlord willing to work with him to apply for the state s first batch of rent relief. But they never heard back. (Elizabeth Robertson/Philadelphia Inquirer)
This story originally appeared on Spotlight PA.
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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.
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SULLIVAN COUNTY, Pa. Robert Keen figured his year of dodging the coronavirus was over. At 84, the retired ambulance driver who still works with his local fire department is among the most at-risk from the disease, and thus was given top priority to get the vaccine. So he called up his doctor last month to schedule an appointment. He was told he would have to wait until April. Keen lives in Forksville, a borough in Sullivan County about 60 miles west of Wilkes-Barre in the northeast. The county has a population of about 6,000 and does not have a hospital. There’s one stoplight, hundreds of acres of forests and state game lands, and one public school district.