Ellen Davidson, staff attorney at The Legal Aid Society, appeared in an Associated Press news story detailing the travails of New York’s Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP).

The program – flush with over $2 billion drawn from state and local funds – launched after a prolonged gestation period in mid-May, yet has to date only disbursed $47 million in funds to 18,000 applicants, far fewer than officials had hoped to reach. To complicate matters, the website created by the state to register applications for funds has been a source of criticism, making for a time-consuming application process plagued by frequent technical problems.

“It took awhile, and that’s been disappointing how long it’s taken,” Davidson said. “You know when you look across the country, I think a lot of places have struggled to create these programs and get them up and running to get the money out.”

Davidson expressed concerns that the slow resolution of these issues could result in a situation akin to a previous iteration of the rental assistance program last year, when unnecessarily stringent application rules resulted in only a portion of the allotted funding being paid out to struggling tenants, creating what she described as “an incentive for the state not to pay it all out, because they then could take that money and use it for something else.”