The Next Human Catastrophe: The Federal Eviction Moratorium Expires This Weekend

Just as a “third wave” of COVID-19 (Delta variant) is now gripping the nation, the pandemic relief measures that Congress passed earlier are set to expire.

The New Republic reports:

Millions of renters who have been unable to pay their rent during the Covid-19 pandemic received a temporary, last-minute reprieve last month when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention extended the federal eviction moratorium to the end of July.

As the CDC’s press release made clear, June’s extension would likely be the last. It was just a delay of the inevitable—come August 1, housing courts will likely be filled once again with landlords clamoring to evict their tenants. (In some states, such as New York and California, which have extended their own moratoriums, that due date will merely come later.)

Note: State governments in Connecticut, Kentucky, North Carolina and Oregon allowed their state eviction measures to expire at the end of June. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium remains in place through July 31.

The numbers paint a dire portrait of precarity: Twice as many households have fallen behind on their rent during the pandemic compared to before Covid-19, and some studies estimate that more than six million households now have rent debt and therefore are at risk of eviction, an existing crisis exacerbated by the pandemic and one that is disproportionately destabilizing Black, Latinx, and low-income families. While Congress approved billions of dollars in emergency rental assistance meant to help people pay off their rent debt, that relief has been slow in coming, in part due to the onerous, unwieldy application process that many states have created, one seemingly designed to make it as difficult as possible to access its benefits; in some instances, landlords have refused to accept that federal assistance at all, making the calculation that in the long run, clearing out their tenants now will maximize their future profits.

As we look to the fall, the worst-case scenario is one that housing organizers have been warning about for months—in the words of Diane Yentel, the head of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, we can expect a “historic wave of evictions and housing instability.” The best-case scenario isn’t much better: stressed renters scrambling to obtain relief and wasting time, money, and energy to fight their landlords in housing court.

Other pandemic relief programs are set to expire in the coming weeks and months, in what will amount to a cascading wave of delayed, and wholly unnecessary, pain. In September, the federal government’s enhanced unemployment benefits will end, a phaseout that has already occurred in the more than two dozen largely Republican-led states that cut off their residents months before the federal expiration date. (That’s if you were able to access the system to begin with—according to a recent analysis by Bloomberg Businessweek, nine million people who lost work during the pandemic didn’t receive any unemployment benefits at all, amounting to “a hole in the safety net as big as the population of Virginia.”)

And on September 30, after more than a year of relief, more than 40 million people with federal student loans will need to resume paying off their debt. For many people, that burden will once again become a crushing financial weight—according to a survey by the advocacy group Student Debt Crisis, 90 percent of people the group spoke with said that they’re financially unready to resume payments. If forced to do so, one out of three people reported that more than a quarter of their income will go toward servicing their student loan debt.

As The New York Times noted about the expiration of these relief programs, the “pandemic safety net is coming apart.” It was always meant to unravel, built as it was upon the idea—now shown to be wishful thinking—that the pandemic would have a predictable end point. (The pandemic still isn’t over, a fact lost on many people in power right now.) For all that these lifelines have benefited millions of Americans, their temporary nature has a built-in cruelty—it says: We’ll give you a taste of what a less precarious life might look like, but just a taste. We’ll take the boot off your neck, but not for good—and when it returns, it’ll feel even more crushing.

But these temporary benefits have sown the seeds of what our future could look like—the power of even half-measures to make a material difference in people’s lives, to give people just a little more breathing room. This month, we’ve seen it again as people started receiving their monthly child tax credit checks, the result of a provision passed by Democrats in the last round of Covid relief. It, too, is meant to be temporary, though some Democrats are pushing for it to be permanent.

Parents have described using the extra cash—typically a few hundred dollars per month, per child—to purchase new clothes for their growing children, to help pay childcare workers a decent wage, to pay off credit card debt, to buy a big box of diapers from Costco, to go on a small family vacation, to chip away at medical debt.

There’s something obscene and depressing about our collective pandemic experience: that it took mass death and suffering to spur the direct government intervention that allowed millions of others to experience—many for the first time—something like financial stability. There’s no good reason, especially as the pandemic drags on, to steal back that small comfort.

Sema K. Sgaier and Aaron Dibner-Dunlap write at the New York Times, How Many People Are at Risk of Losing Their Homes in Your Neighborhood?

Alongside the prospect of a new surge in coronavirus infections, another crisis is on the horizon: A nationwide wave of evictions threatens more than six million families that have fallen behind on rent.

The true extent of the threat has been masked by a national moratorium on evictions. But that ban will expire on Saturday, allowing landlords to start or continue eviction proceedings in most states.

See the share of households at risk by entering your county in the search field below. (use link above).

This problem is especially acute in 250 counties where at least one in five renters are behind, according to our analysis. But nationwide, the sheer scale of rent debt is alarming: An estimated $23 billion in all is outstanding, with about $3,800 per average household in arrears.

State and local governments can prevent this rental crisis from becoming a homelessness crisis with help from nearly $50 billion in federal Emergency Rental Assistance funds. Yet despite laudable coordination efforts and recent acceleration, the rollout is too slow, too few renters are eligible, and the application process is too complicated. As a result, funds are reaching only a small fraction of those who need them most.

[D]istributing direct aid this way is new to many governments and every locality has a unique housing landscape. But with the moratorium ending in just days, they have run out of time.

There is also a huge eligibility gap: We estimate that of the 6.2 million households in arrears, half make more money than the federal program allows and therefore aren’t eligible. The result is that at-risk households in nearly every county are still catastrophically behind.

Our analysis was based on the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, from which we were able to estimate every renting household’s likelihood of being behind on rent.

We found that in the 84 largest urban counties, including Philadelphia, St. Louis and Dallas, renters face a collective $13 billion bill. Also worrying are counties across the Deep South. In several counties in South Carolina and Mississippi, for example, more than one in four renters are behind. There are also millions of households at risk in small counties. In Columbia County, Ga., north of Augusta, we estimate 1,200 households owe a collective $4.6 million.

The numbers in large urban areas are staggering. Nearly 300,000 renters owe an average of $5,300 each in Los Angeles County. In New York City, over 400,000 renters owe a collective $2 billion. Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Miami-Dade, Philadelphia, Phoenix and San Diego all show at least 55,000 families at risk of eviction for nonpayment.

This crisis also underscores existing inequities in America. Those who’ve lost employment income in the pandemic face three times greater odds that they are in arrears. According to our analysis, being Black means you are approximately twice as likely to be behind on rent, even after accounting for differences in education, employment, living situation and other factors. Hispanic and Asian families are also considerably more likely to have fallen behind than white families (about 10 percent of white households owe back rent).

This is a preventable crisis.

It should be much easier for families to get access to programs that can help them pay their rent. In addition, states and localities should invest 10 percent of their federal funds in eviction diversion programs, such as legal aid and mediation; these programs could help people who don’t qualify for Emergency Rental Assistance because their incomes are too high.

States and localities can extend their own emergency eviction moratoriums [Arizona did not], increase awareness of tenant rights, and allow arrears to be converted to civil debt, for which a tenant can’t be evicted, while households are waiting for their federal rent assistance. Seeking out vulnerable renters is key: Washington State, for example, focuses on historically marginalized groups, while Houston uses the Centers for Disease Control’s Social Vulnerability Index to direct its outreach. Other counties should do the same, using the C.D.C. index or our own organization’s tool, the Covid-19 Community Vulnerability Index.

If state and local governments fail to act quickly after the moratorium is lifted [as Arizona will], then local leaders and concerned neighbors must be prepared to help families through the eviction process. A good resource to start with is the Eviction Lab, a research program that has published a useful directory of over 600 organizations that can help those facing eviction.

Now that we know where the most renters are in trouble, we have the tools we need to prevent a new kind of pandemic. Families who fell behind on rent don’t have time to wait.

Some Resources:

Arizona Courts COVID-19 Processing Eviction Matters.

Web page for AZEvictionHelp.

Arizona Department of Housing: Rental Assistance & Eviction Prevention Programs.

Arizona Department of Economic Security. Emergency Rental Assistance Program.

NeedHelpPayingBills Arizona eviction prevention and homeless programs.

Your local county government also has rental assistance programs and eviction prevention programs. Check your local county government web page.