Help coming for people struggling to pay mortgages, but not for a while

Congress' last COVID stimulus bill included more than $200 million for North Carolina homeowners.

Posted 2:45 p.m. Jun 4, 2021 — Updated 8:06 p.m. Jun 7, 2021

Travis Fain

, WRAL statehouse reporter

The last COVID-19 stimulus bill from Congress had $273 million in it to help North Carolina homeowners cover mortgage payments.

The program hasn't opened yet for applicants, and administrators are still working on details. There's no timeline yet to start taking applications, according to the N.C. Housing Finance Agency, which will run the initiative.

"Moving as quickly as we can," HFA Executive Director Scott Farmer said Thursday.

Sixty percent of the program's money will help people who make the median income or less for their area. The rest will go to people making up to 150 percent of that median income.

It's not yet clear how much homeowners will get a month, but "we should be able to cover their full mortgage payment up to a certain point," Farmer said.

The HFA is waiting on the U.S. Treasury Department to fill in those details, Farmer said.

Government programs like this often take time to stand up. Congress passed the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, in March, but the next step involved federal agencies writing more detailed rules. There's also a second appropriations process at the state legislature, and Gov. Roy Cooper signed that bill into law May 24.

The HFA's leg work started before that, but Farmer said the agency "couldn't get too far ahead" of the bill. Right now the agency is talking to software vendors about getting an online application portal. The agency also hopes to have a call center so people can apply on the phone, Farmer said.

The agency is also gathering data so it knows who to focus on when the money starts flowing.

”We know they’re out there," Farmer said. "It’s just trying to make that connection."

This is North Carolina's first pandemic-related mortgage assistance program, at least to operate statewide. State lawmakers considered creating one like it last year, but that legislation didn't pass.

The state did start a rental assistance program last year, which has since gotten a boost of more than half a billion dollars in additional federal support. The latest version of that program is looking for more applicants, so much so that Gov. Roy Cooper held a press conference earlier this week in part to call attention to the program.

An earlier version of that program, called HOPE, got so many applicants it stopped accepting them after less than a month.

As for the mortgage assistance program, more information to come, Farmer said.

“We’re trying to move as quickly as we can, with the understanding that this is a complicated process and there’s a lot of documentation that has to be gathered," he said. "As soon as we have a time line, we’ll post that time line."

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