County processed 2K rental assistance applications in April

Clark County’s rental assistance program, aimed at providing residents with housing payments, processed about 2,000 applications for the entire month of April.

The county’s CARES Housing Assistance Program, or CHAP, has served as a lifeline for many Southern Nevada families to catch up with their back rent. More than 24,000 local households have received help with rent, mortgage or utility assistance since July through CHAP.

Still, about 9,000 pending applications are under review by staff.

“This is significantly fewer pending applications than we were reporting a month ago, but the decrease is largely due to the number of previous applicants who are not moving forward in this process,” said county spokesman Dan Kulin in a statement Thursday to the Review-Journal.

The number of applications cleared each week is fewer than what the county had previously projected. Kevin Schiller, assistant county manager at Clark County, previously said in late March that the county hoped to process upward of 2,300 CHAP applications for approval each week.

At around the same time, about 23,000 applicants were notified of changes to CHAP and were told that they needed to provide documentation if they wanted their application to move forward.

“Among those who have decided not to continue, it is possible the changes to the program made them no longer eligible for the housing assistance,” said Kulin.

The new version of CHAP only provides rental assistance since mortgage assistance was no longer offered. Household income limits also were lowered.

So far, CHAP has distributed more than $97 million to qualifying families.

Clark County received an additional $32 million for rental assistance and an additional $129 million is expected from the state and neighboring cities — the combined $161 million amount, officials say, is expected to help 40,000 more households.

Contact Jonathan Ng at jng@reviewjournal.com. Follow @ByJonathanNg on Twitter.