New Mexico Home Fund review: Emergency rental assistance

In April of 2022 a criminal landlord began trying to evict my family for no fault of our own.

We filed with the assisstance programs in our state. We researched the Emergency Rental Assistance peogram, that is funded by the US Treasury. We found that to apply we had to go through our state's New Mexico Home Fund.

We filled out the applications for the assisstance, and promptly put them in. We were not behind on our rent and were told on several occasions that we could not get assisstance.

Upon reading the parameters of the program on the Treasury website we found that we should be eligible, and that the money could be used to hire an attorney in an eviction. That it could be used for emergency relocation and deposit and moving expenses.

We called NM Home Fund, sat on hold for 4and a half hours, finally getting a person on the line. When asked about the program and why we had not been responded to as to questions of the use of the funds. He placed us on hold to ask a supervisor. When he returned he stated that someone would call us back that day. This occurred in November of 2022. We ate still awaiting this call back. August of 2023.

We have seen young couples with both working and no children get not one check but two different allotments from the program without so much as a statement of being late on rent. We have been fighting eviction practices of violation of both civil and criminal statutes. We have not received any fundi g or form of assisstance fro. The ERAP1 or 2. Not only did we file starting in April of 2022 we have updated or refilled with current information approximately every three months since then until the website stated that no more applications would be accepted.

Surfing this whole timeframe I made contact with Directors of the programs in NM by email a ski g for help and being redirected to other services who as well either ignored or refused to help.

I have tried to file complaints with every entity in NM. To include the Senators, the Govenor, the Attourney General a office, etc. I have reached out to the federal level as well with the Department of Justice, and numerous others.

To this date we have not seen any assisstance except for liheap, and a HUD section 8 choice voucher that no-one will accept.

We do continue to fight this wrongful and illegal eviction in court after 16 months. And we remain in the home currently as we have no where else to go or any way to afford to move.

We have been informed that the funds earmarked for housing assisstance have been depleted and we are now truly, "SCREWED" by the system.