A New Jersey pastor with decades of experience resettling refugees from across the world has housed around 350 migrants in apartments in towns all across the state, where after an initial buffer period, they pay the full rent.
For years, Seth Kaper-Dale, a pastor at the Reformed Church of Highland Park, which runs an associated affordable housing nonprofit, has overseen resettlement of refugees through the State Department with federal funds.
But as a surge of migrants crossed the southern U.S. border seeking asylum in 2022, the nonprofit expanded its model to house asylum seekers who weren’t eligible for any federal aid for the first time, with the help of a $400,000 grant from an anonymous foundation for this purpose.
The premise is simple. Newly arriving migrants, who often aren’t immediately eligible to receive federal aid or work papers often find off-the-books gigs. In Kaper-Dale’s assessment, their main hurdle to housing themselves isn’t an inability to pay rent. Rather, it’s the difficulty of securing a lease without a bank account, credit history or enough cash in hand to cover a security deposit and first and last month’s rent up front.
“Landlords make you jump through all those hoops. None of these people will be able to jump through all these hoops,” Kaper-Dale said on a recent afternoon outside his Highland Park home base, which serves as a hub for career services, English classes, childcare, meal service, and a self-file clinic to help people submit their asylum claims or Temporary Protected Status applications. “We have to help [people] through the hoops.”
That’s where the Reformed Church of Highland Park Housing Corporation forges relationships with landlords, signing leases, covering the upfront costs, and even furnishing units all at a cost averaging just over $5,000 per person. The nonprofit pays the landlord each month, while migrants pay the nonprofit after the first month with wiggle room up front on a case-by-case basis as people get on their feet.
“Landlords are the key to this whole thing. They don’t need to be playing social worker to a whole bunch of people in need, or to take risks with people. We don’t want them taking risks. We want to be taking the risk,” Kaper-Dale said.
“Taking the risk on ourselves is so much less expensive than carrying the ball forever and making people move in the direction of complete and total reliance.”
They place people in units where they’re confident they’ll be able to pay rent, say, putting six single men in a three-bedroom or a family of three in a one-bedroom. The vast majority of people who move into their units are able to pay rent on their own within a few months, Kaper-Dale said.
“People are taking care of themselves because that’s what people do,” he said. “Those who are coming in, who’ve walked through eight countries, are not the same people who need very low income affordable housing. These are folks who expect to have to pull themselves up by their bootstraps as every immigrant population has done.”The New Jersey program offers potential lessons for New York City, which has struggled to help migrants move out of city-run shelters into private housing and has resorted to kicking some families out after 60 days and single adults after just 30 days.
Many families have remained in shelters for months, at a steep cost to taxpayers, with the city spending $388 a day, or around $11,000 a month. Of the more than 180,000 migrants who’ve entered city shelters over the past two years, around 64,000 remain.
The state’s limited resettlement program has been plagued with bureaucratic delays. Nearly a year since its launch, the program has only managed to move 197 families out of shelter in nearly a year, of a promised 1,250.
‘A Blessing’
Families have found their way to the Reformed Church of Highland Park almost exclusively by word of mouth, from advocates, community groups and sometimes other migrants. Such was the case for Dave and Mayra, who arrived in New Jersey with their 15-year-old daughter from Colombia after crossing the border in early January. They asked that their last names not be published for fear of immigration consequences.
An offer from a friend to put the family up fell through, leaving them no place to go. The family ended up in an overcrowded shelter at a church in Gutenberg, N. J.
“We were in the street,” Mayra said. “We had nowhere to sleep.”
While New York City opened a central intake for arriving migrants at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, there’s no such location in New Jersey or its cities. Faith organizations and nonprofits have stepped in to try and fill the gap, NJ.com reported.
Then the family had a stroke of good luck. Mayra called a friend in Miami, who called a friend in New Jersey, who linked them up to the church program. They sent the family an Uber and put them up in a hotel for a few days while they readied a $1,700-a-month one-bedroom apartment in Metuchen. Within a few days, the family moved in.
The apartment came fully furnished. Both husband and wife are working in a restaurant near their apartment.
“It’s so cozy, there are some days we don’t even want to leave,” Mayra said.
Mayra’s husband Dave said having the apartment has eased his mind.
“It’s a place to start, to work and save, and pay for our own rent, and start to have our things,” he said.
Another participant in the church program, Margoth, 33, a single mother from Ecuador, has spent almost a year in a house rented through the church. She also asked that her last name not be published out of concern for potential immigration consequences. Margoth, who works in a nearby restaurant, shares the house with her two cousins and their children, and the extended family members share responsibilities. Margoth’s portion of the rent is $1,000, for a room she shares with her two children.
“I feel tranquility there,” she said in Spanish.
A friend from Ecuador who ended up living in a New York City shelter struggled with life there, Margoth said, including constant surveillance from staff and a prohibition against cooking, with outside food confiscated at the door. Her friend ended up moving back to Ecuador.
“On the one hand you save money in rent, but it’s not the same,” Margoth said in Spanish. “It’s not a place to have a normal life.”
‘Skin in The Game’
Over the past two decades the Reformed Church of Highland Park has expanded its footprint, renting out many of the apartments above storefronts on the town’s main downtown strip for arriving refugees, as well as woodshop where volunteers train recent arrivals in woodworking (They making bunk beds and dressers to use in the program’s leased apartments.)
At an adjoining free store, people newly entering the program can stock up on warm clothes and other necessities. The church group also initially covered the first three months’ rent, before scaling that back, Kaper-Dale said.
“If they got a little bit of money in their pocket, [they] get some skin in the game here right off the bat,” he said. “We make it clear with folks, this is about self-sufficiency. If you can’t pay, we’ll have very real conversations with you in a couple months.”
Central to the program’s success are relationships with landlords, said Kaper-Dale. He’s developed relationships with certain landlords who now flag open apartments as they become available. For a three-bedroom renting at $2,400, he might go back and forth with a landlord over who will live there.
“He says, ‘You can put six in there. ’I say, ‘Are you okay if it’s three families of two, or if it’s six single men?’”
“They’re all able to pay $400 bucks in a month,” he said. “There’s nobody who can’t.”
Unlike New York’s resettlement program, which makes migrants the leaseholders, the church housing corporation holds the lease. The state’s resettlement program pays a year of rent directly to the landlords, after which the tenant is expected to pay the rent on their own to the landlords.
In the case of the Reformed Church of Highland Park program, the church pays the landlord rent, while tenants pay the church, an arrangement that can be appealing to property owners.
Frank Assuncao, a landlord with the company Penny Properties LLC, worked with Kaper-Dale for around two years, renting out a dozen units to the church.
“I’m dealing with two or three guys in the office at the church for 15 tenants, which is great,” he said.
Assuncao said his main concern is turnover, sometimes without notice. At one of his units a couple had been renting, all of a sudden he found four men living there with no warning. Kaper-Dale said people in his program regularly move on to other rentals or other cities and states as they make more connections and find other work opportunities, and they work to quickly find new participants to take their place.
“So the communication from them could be a little bit better,” he said, but overall, “it’s definitely a positive experience.”
Kaper-Dale said while families sometimes fall behind if they lose work or have other disruptions, the church has a funding buffer to help them catch up.
“If somebody totally blows us off, we’ll say, ‘Move on. This isn’t for you,’” he said. “We have our frustrations from time to time. But mostly it works. There’s always a few people who are going to take advantage.”
New York City advocates grappling with the migrant housing crisis are eyeing the New Jersey program with interest.
Dave Giffen, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, said that while he is concerned about the renters’ lack of tenancy rights, which could leave them vulnerable to eviction, New York City should consider any novel program that might help more people move out of hotels, tents and warehouses: “I’m open to any creative solutions that are helping people get stabilized into housing.”