More than 15,000 Illinois homeowners stayed in their homes thanks to pandemic aid. That money has run out

Byron Brooks, 57, had been at his job in sales for 15 years, often working six to seven days a week clocking more than 100 hours per week before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Flush with overtime pay, Brooks said he was able to purchase his first home in the West Pullman neighborhood in 2018.

But when the pandemic hit, his overtime work stopped, cutting his average yearly earnings down from around $60,000 to around $40,000. Then, he said, his basement flooded, costing him over $5,000 and wiping out a chunk of his savings.

Brooks said he fell behind on his roughly $1,200 monthly mortgage payments for at least two years, went into bankruptcy and worried he was going to lose his home.

“I struggled to keep everything paid on time,” said Brooks, who had started driving for Amazon to supplement his income and eventually worked for the company full time after he lost his sales job. “It got to be too much.”

Then a friend told him about the Illinois Housing Development Authority’s assistance fund for homeowners facing pandemic-related hardships who had fallen behind on their mortgage, property taxes, insurance and/or homeowner association fee payments.

Brooks is one of more than 15,000 Illinois homeowners who received assistance to stay in their homes thanks to the Illinois Homeowner Assistance Fund, run by the state’s housing authority and financed through the federal American Rescue Plan Act. The roughly $300 million fund, which closed Oct. 31, is expected to be depleted once the agency grants final requests for assistance, marking the end of major COVID-19-related aid for Illinois homeowners.

Kristin Faust, executive director of the Illinois Housing Development Authority, said the state heeded lessons from the 2008 housing market collapse to prevent widespread foreclosures during the pandemic, working with the federal government to encourage mortgage servicers to grant forbearance — temporarily pausing or reducing mortgage bills until borrowers can make payments.

The state and federal government also issued various moratoria on foreclosures in 2020 and 2021.

“One of the reasons why we didn’t have a foreclosure crisis from COVID … is because the state and federal government, upfront, took much more aggressive actions to protect homeowners,” Faust said.

In the first round of funding, which started in April 2022, Illinois homeowners were eligible to apply for up to $30,000 of assistance. This number doubled to $60,000 for the second round of funding in November 2022. Fifty-eight partner organizations received almost $9 million in federal aid to help administer the program.

If homeowners were behind more than $60,000, applicants were directed to legal aid organizations to help them submit for any outstanding funds, according to the Illinois Housing Development Authority. The authority said if homeowners were unable to provide the rest of the financing, they were ineligible for assistance.

Valerie Dick, 63, and her husband, Ken, 68, live in DuPage County and fell behind about $61,000 on their mortgage payments. They were still able to receive assistance because one of their daughters filled the gap between their debt and what the housing authority could provide.

Dick’s husband had an accident a little over a year before the pandemic that left him disabled. During his recovery, the company he worked for closed, he went into cardiac arrest and the pandemic hit as they were already struggling to keep up with their costs, she said.

Dick said she stayed on top of their mortgage payments for some months thanks to help from family and savings. But those savings ran out, and their income had dropped to $1,200 a month from her disability payments, less than a quarter of what their earnings had been, she said. Their mortgage payments were $1,150 a month.

“You never think a man who works six days a week, 10 hours a day doing everything he can for his family is going to one day not be able to work,” said Dick, who has been disabled and unable to work for years.

She said her husband was also scared to leave the home for any job given that she has an autoimmune disease and had seen her cousin die from COVID-19. Dick found herself going to food pantries and unable to pay her mortgage on her home of 37 years.

Dick said she heard about the assistance program through the judge at one of her foreclosure court hearings. If she and her husband had not received aid, she said they would have had to move in with one of their kids until they got some form of subsidized housing.

“Nobody can get me down anymore … and we have a good life,” Dick said. “If I didn’t have (the Illinois Homeowners Assistance Fund), I probably wouldn’t have had this opinion of life.”

To be eligible for assistance, homeowners had to be experiencing financial hardships as a result of the pandemic, as well as have a household income at or below 150% of the area median income. In the Chicago area, this is $165,450 for a family of four, according to the city’s Housing Department. Applicants also had to own and occupy the property as their primary residence, and the residence could not be more than four units.

As of the fund’s closing, more than 43,000 people had applied for assistance, with a spike of nearly 1,000 applications received on the final day. By Oct. 30, the authority had a denial rate of about 50%. Faust said many of those who had been rejected were in forbearance, not behind on their mortgage payments, or had submitted incomplete applications and were referred to partner agencies for assistance completing the application.

Faust said the fund served people in 98 out of 102 counties in the state, with an average grant size of around $18,000. Shortly before the fund closed, 39% of approved applicants had been unemployed for more than 90 days, according to the agency.

While Chicago and Illinois consistently top lists for areas in the country with the highest rates of foreclosure filings, the Illinois Housing Development Authority and other foreclosure experts attribute this to the state’s lengthy foreclosure process. The process is lengthier than some other states given that foreclosures are processed through the court system in Illinois.

Out of 223 metropolitan areas analyzed, Chicago was second on the list for the highest number of foreclosure starts at 2,584 in the third quarter of this year, down 35% from the same time the prior year, according to ATTOM, a national property data provider.

Housing agencies and homeowners told the Tribune that without the assistance fund, many more people would have faced foreclosure and lost their homes.

Tracey Becker, 36, lives in Jo Daviess County on the border of Iowa and Wisconsin and saw her work as a bartender and mental health counselor dry up early in the pandemic, causing her to fall behind on her mortgage payments. She purchased her home in 2010 and had never fallen behind on her mortgage payments before, she said.

“(It was a) bit chaotic trying to figure out what I could do just because we live in an area that doesn’t have a lot of resources,” said Becker, who lives with her two kids.

Brooks of West Pullman is now caught up on his mortgage payments. He was able to access the homeowners assistance fund with the help of the South Side Community Federal Credit Union — one of the housing authority’s partner organizations.

“It was a relief,” Brooks said, “because I would try to save and catch up on bills … to pay the back pay … and worried still about a foreclosure,” adding that he would have had to live with a friend if he lost his home.

As of the second quarter of this year, nearly 400,000 homeowners at risk of foreclosure have received help through homeowner assistance programs funded by the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021, according to the U.S. Department of Treasury.

While the state no longer has money for direct mortgage assistance, it plans to open a $25 million fund for people whose homes require repairs. The program, called the Illinois Homeowner Assistance Fund Home Repair Program, is expected to aid nearly 420 homeowners whose home maintenance needs were delayed or made worse because of the pandemic, according to the agency.

“Our state was very committed to keeping people in their homes and making sure homeowners didn’t lose their homes unnecessarily,” Faust said. “I feel like working together, we succeeded in that.”