More than three inches of snow cover the sidewalks of this residential community in the West Englewood neighborhood. This might sound like an obstacle for Clarence Diming, who is blind, but the walkway and sidewalk outside his house are clean. One of his neighbors took it upon himself to clean the area for this retired worker.

“My philosophy is do onto others as you would like them to do to you,” said Clarence Diming. “One of the things that are important is to take care of where you live.”

This adds some relief to this senior citizen during a time when the pandemic has made life difficult for millions of Americans who are struggling to pay their bills, rent, or mortgage.

This retired worker lives check to check, but recently, he received another helping hand.

Maria Pappas is good with numbers and serves as the Cook County treasurer. The city of Chicago is one of its municipalities.

“The essence of this is, in a depressing and demoralizing time in human history, is to be able to do something for someone,” said Pappas. “The African American community, in this respect, is disenfranchised.”

She is using her skills to bring relief to struggling property owners through a program she called Black Houses Matter.

“In March, everyone called me and said, ‘You have to come to the streets and march with us and we are going to do Black Lives Matter.’ I said, ‘No, no, no. I'm doing something that I can put my teeth into and has a concrete solution.’ Out of that arose Black Houses Matter.”

Her goal is to help property owners, in Black and brown communities, receive unclaimed property tax refunds.

The initiative helps the owners avoid losing their property if they have a property tax delinquency by applying for millions of dollars available in refunds for either overpayment for the last 20 years or missing property-tax exceptions for the last four years.

Usually, if a homeowner missed an exemption to save them money, no one from the county was there to point it out. Under the program, the treasurer’s office now seeks out homeowners who it thinks might have an exemption they didn’t file. The program gives two additional months to pay property taxes that are delinquent and headed to delinquency tax sale.

Millions of Americans have not been able to pay their mortgages in over a year, and fortunately, many are in mortgage forbearance. However, most of those forbearance periods end in just a few months and many could be in danger of losing their homes.

According to the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), at least one million Americans will be in “imminent danger of foreclosure” by October, and by December, that number could rise to more than 2 million.

“This is sort of an unprecedented situation,” said Mark McArdle, assistant director of mortgage markets at the CFPB.

The CFPB is a government agency that was created after the 2008 housing crisis and is charged with preventing another housing crisis this year.

"A lot of this depends on income and whether folks get their incomes back,” explained McArdle. “If they do, there are a lot of interesting tools out there to help them.”

The CFPB issued a warning this month to banks, essentially asking banks to start working with homeowners to prevent foreclosures.

The agency suggests banks do the following: increase staff, address potential language access issues for non-English speaking homeowners, start contacting borrowers before the foreclosure period ends, and give borrowers options.

The CFPB has approved a streamlined process for loan modification to make this option easier for banks and borrowers.

“We want servicers to know that we are paying close attention,” said McArdle. "This is our number one priority to make sure servicers treat borrowers fairly, that they evaluate them for all options and that they use all the tools at their disposal.”

To ensure that, the CFPB is also proposing a rule to stop banks from filing any foreclosures until the end of the year. After a brief public comment period, it’s expected to be approved by the end of summer and banks could face hefty fines if they do not comply.

The CFPB said it will monitor, in real-time, whether banks and services are following the guidance. Homeowners with potential issues could file complaints directly on the CFPB’s website.

“The jury is out on how effective the enforcement action will be, but it is certainly better than sitting on the government's hands and doing nothing,” said Patricia McCoy, a law professor at Boston College Law School.

McCoy was the first head of the CFPB’s Mortgage Markets unit.

She recommends homeowners protect themselves further by proactively reaching out to the mortgage service or at least pick up the call when they make the required effort to reach out to you.

McCoy also suggests asking for an evaluation. The earlier you do it the better chance you won’t get jammed up with millions who will be coming off forbearance at the same time. To further protect themselves, homeowners should document all contact with their servicer or bank. It’s important to note the name of the person you talked to, the date, time, and a note about the conversation.

“Last piece of advice: there are free housing counselors in every state,” said McCoy. “They can help you. They can be your counselor through this process.”

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau has a ‘find a housing counselor’ tool on its website. You simply put in your zip code and will be given the information on a free housing counselor near you.

Some landlords and tenants have had a rocky relationship this past year. Landlords have needed to pay their mortgages and many tenants had a tough time paying rent. Despite all the bumps in the road, things may have smoothened out a bit, and the two adversaries are now working together to get what each of them needs.

On the commercial real estate side, many landlords or property managers have worked out payment arraignments, waived past rent, and have even opted for a percentage in sales instead or a lease extension in lieu of payment.

For example, last year, the brick-and-mortar clothing store, Rue Saint Paul, opened just five weeks before the U.S. went into lockdown.

“The world was just starting to hear about COVID-19, but it was still something that still seemed incredibly far off,” said Kelly Wang. "It was something that was in the back of my mind as something that might impact the business.”

Wang is the owner of the eco-friendly nothing retailer. She thought, then, the worst-case scenario was that the business would close for a few weeks. It ended up closing for four months, and she couldn’t afford the rent for the Brooklyn retail space.

“Because we were so new, we weren’t eligible for any of the government funding programs,” Wang added.

She had been in contact with her landlord, each month through the shutdown. They allowed her to hold off on payment until she reopened. But now, it would be a struggle to pay four months at once, especially since she had almost no revenue coming in all those months. So, she reached back out to her landlord once more to see if there was another agreement they could come to.

“To be honest, I was timid to go to my landlord,” she explained. "I had offered to potentially paying it maybe down the road in a balloon payment and he came back and said let’s just split it.”

For her landlord, it made sense to try and keep her as a tenant instead of trying to find a new tenant during a struggling time in commercial real estate. It also kept another business in the community when several have had to close.

“If we were to have paid our rent in full, we wouldn’t have been able to open our doors in July and get the inventory that we needed to start sales again,” said Wang.

Landlords and tenants are now working together more on the residential property side of things as well.

"It is happening throughout the industry and it doesn’t matter if it is a larger operator or an individual that has a couple of single-family homes,” said Bob Pennigar, president of the National Apartment Association.

Pinnegar says the $25 billion Congress set aside for rent relief has played a major role in residential landlords and tenants working together over the past four months.

“What I am hearing is that property owners are starting to work with the residents to get them to fill out the paperwork and apply for the funds,” Pennigar explained. "Some jurisdictions will allow the property owner to apply for the funds on behalf of the resident.”

Some property owners have turned their offices into rent relief application centers for residents and are guiding them through the complicated process, particularly helpful to lower-income residents who don’t have a computer or internet access.

“In those situations, where we are seeing property owners and residents teaming up to apply for the funds, it is happening faster,” added Pennigar

The money from Congress is only a fraction of the amount of outstanding rent in the U.S., so the landlords and tenants teaming up to apply for rent relief may be a key factor to getting the help before the money runs out.

These are challenging times, and it’s reflected in alarming numbers. Numbers like 27,112, which represents how many people who have died from COVID-19 in the United States, or 618,923, which is the number of people who have been diagnosed with the virus around the country.

Last week, the U.S. hit an all-time high number of 16 million, that being the number of Americans who have to filed for unemployment since the pandemic began to spread.

“Everyone is having a hard time,” said Igor Popov with Apartment List.

Apartment List recently conducted a nationwide survey among renters and homeowners, and that has revealed other concerning numbers.

“One in 4 renters couldn’t make their full rent for April, and 1 in 4 homeowners couldn’t make their full mortgage payment,” said Popov. “Half of the people that couldn’t make it in full couldn’t make a payment at all.”

That’s an estimated 80 million Americans who struggled to pay one of their most essential bills, and that survey is actually more optimistic than one done by the National Multifamily Housing Council. NMHC’s study showed as many as 1 in 3 Americans were unable to pay rent in April.

“One of the things we found was that among those who weren’t able to pay their April rent in full, almost half those had reached some sort of agreement with their landlord or property manager to either defer payments or have reduced payments,” said Popov. “Also, 1 in 9 renters actually said that their landlord proactively lowered their rent for April.”

With stimulus checks getting out to millions of Americans this week, Apartment List found many people plan to use those checks to pay their backed up or next month’s rent or mortgage.

However, should shelter-in-place mandates continue into May and June, Apartment List found we could see 27 percent of renters and 13 percent of homeowners unable to pay their rent or mortgages.

“I think that what is becoming apparent is that the sooner that the conversation can begin the better,” said Popov. “We are finding that a lot of landlord renter pairs are able to work out arrangements.”

The same applies for homeowners and their lenders. Federally backed mortgages are allow people to defer or reduce their mortgages up to a year, while private lenders are offering flexibility, too. The key here, is also, contacting your lender as early as possible.