Rockford Sun

The City of Rockford is making rental assistance available to residents who are in need of help or are unemployed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Rental assistance has always been a program that we’ve done," Homeless Program Coordinator Angie Walker told My Stateline. "We’ve done it for many years. We’ve always had it, but we’ve never seen it as this capacity,"

Many people in the city are concerned that with the coronavirus pandemic, they won't be able to meet payments.

“I can tell you that our number of calls has probably tripled, at this point,” Walker told My Stateline. “We had some people that had employment before, have always paid their bills, have always paid their rent. Maybe they lived paycheck-to-paycheck, didn’t make a lot of money, but they made enough to pay their rent and be stable in their housing.”

Karl Fauerbach, president of the Rockford Apartment Association, told My Stateline that even though most landlords are still regularly receiving rent payments, it's a good idea for them to have open communication with renters. 

“It’s our experience that if you let a tenant get too far behind, they just get overloaded and they just can’t get themselves back to Square One,” he told My Stateline. “Tenants that do have trouble, we are letting them know about the program.”

Walker said the Rent and Mortgage Assistance Program is still being funded and encourages those who need help to contact them. 

“With the increases that the government has given us to try to keep people stabilized, we feel like we’re in a really good position,” she told My Stateline. “The rules within our programs are probably as flexible as I’ve ever seen them, so we’re really just trying to help as many people as we can."