As it gears up to restart payments, Oregon’s housing agency reports that slightly more than 39,000 households have benefited from $278.3 million in federal emergency rental assistance, close to Oregon’s total allocation of $289 million.

The Oregon Housing and Community Services Department is now looking at 4,782 applications submitted before a pause Dec. 1 (4,276 of them will require more information from tenants or landlords before processing can proceed) and then look at 6,941 applications submitted since the pause ended Jan. 26.

The agency issued an update Feb. 9.

The agency says it and partner organizations, chiefly community action agencies or counties themselves, will continue to accept applications — but time is short. The likely deadline is early March.

The Oregon Legislature added $100 million to emergency rental assistance from the tax-supported general fund during a Dec. 13 special session, on top of $200 million in December 2020 that was spent by mid-2021. Gov. Kate Brown has requested $198 million more from the U.S. Treasury, which has not yet reallocated federal money that went unspent in other states and communities. Oregon did get an additional $1.1 million in January.

According to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, Oregon ranks fifth best in terms of rental assistance payouts, topped in ascending order only by North Carolina, New York, Texas and Connecticut.

Tenants can apply only once for the program. Not every household will qualify.

According to federal guidelines, priority goes to households earning less than 50% of an area’s median income — for Portland, that is around $40,000 — and one or more adults unemployed for at least 90 days. According to state guidelines, other eligibility factors are the size of households, months behind on rent, effects of 2020 Labor Day wildfires, and whether the residents are in a census tract deemed to have a high percentage of low-income renters, as measured by the rental assistance priority index of the Urban Institute.

Under a state law revised during the Dec. 13 special session, tenants can receive legal protection against eviction for nonpayment of rent if they show proof to their landlords they have applied for emergency assistance. The same law also eased the Feb. 28 deadline for payment of past-due rent — owed since the onset of the pandemic on April 1, 2020, through June 2021 — if a tenant has an application pending for emergency assistance. Otherwise the deadline remains Feb. 28.

The law does not forgive any past-due rents.

Becky Straus, an attorney with the Oregon Law Center, said the changes can be confusing.

“It can be hard to keep up with the changes. We want everyone to know that in Oregon, no one should be evicted for nonpayment of rent when there are new safe-harbor extensions and rent assistance available,” said Straus, managing attorney for the center’s eviction defense project. “Unfortunately, we are seeing many people in court who shouldn’t be there because they didn’t know about the protections or how to get help.”

Straus said the law gives tenants 10 days to respond to notices of eviction from their landlords. Tenants can get in touch with the eviction defense project, which is funded by the state, Multnomah County, the city of Portland and foundations to provide legal representation. It operates statewide, and provides free services in English and Spanish — translators for other languages are available — without regard to citizenship status.

“As the new COVID variant continues to sweep across our state, people are losing income because of illness or businesses that can’t operate. Some people are still struggling to catch up from the economic hit of the past couple of years,” Straus said. “We are lucky in Oregon that short-term help is available for people who are still dealing with the economic upheaval of the pandemic and we just need to make sure they know the help is available at every step of the way.”