Mississippi Home Corporation has opened a waitlist for tenants seeking some of the $200 million allocated in the latest stimulus package from Congress for rental assistance in Mississippi.
To get on the Rental Assistance for Mississippians Program (RAMP) Emergency Rental Assistance waitlist, renters may fill out an application on ms-ramp.com.
The program hasn’t officially launched, but the Home Corporation announced that Gov. Tate Reeves had chosen the organization to administer the funding from the U.S. Department of Treasury.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control eviction moratorium will remain in place until March 31 under an extension the agency announced last week. To avoid eviction, a renter must provide a declaration to their landlord or property manager, certifying that the order applies to them.
Kentucky Equal Justice Center developed a tool that allows people facing eviction to fill out and sign the CDC document online and email it to their landlord. Click here to use the tool.
Whereas the existing RAMP program, funded by an Emergency Solutions Grant (ESG) from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, included strict eligibility guidelines that caused several thousand to be denied, the treasury money is more flexible. For one, it raises the income limit for eligibility from 50% to 80% of the area’s median income.
In Hinds County, families of four would qualify if they earned under $56,700, instead of the previous $35,450.
Mississippi has also yet to begin pushing out its additional $38 million in Community Development Block Grant funding, which Reeves committed entirely to rental assistance in October, Mississippi Today reported.
By last week, HUD had yet to provide guidance to states for how to use those funds to pay off past rent debts, according to a spokesperson from the federal agency. “That component is expected soon,” an email read.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.