'Down the drain’: Millions face eviction after Biden lets protections expire
'Down the drain’: Millions face eviction after Biden lets protections expire
The federal eviction moratorium in place since September is set to expire Saturday, after the Biden administration refused to extend it and Democrats in Congress couldn't muster the votes to intervene.
About 7.4 million adult tenants reported they were behind on rent. | AP Photo/Elise Amendola
By KATY O'DONNELL
07/31/2021
As the clock runs out on a nationwide eviction ban for what’s expected to be the final time, millions of tenants are staring at the prospect of losing their homes as they wait for emergency rental aid that the government has failed to deliver.
The federal eviction moratorium in place since September is set to expire Saturday, after the Biden administration refused to extend it and Democrats in Congress couldn't muster the votes to intervene.Now lawmakers and activists fear an unprecedented surge in evictions in the coming months just as the highly transmissible Delta variant causes a spike in coronavirus cases.
The eviction wave is expected to hit population centers across the country. Housing advocates point to renters in Ohio, Texas and parts of the Southeast — where tenant protections are generally low, housing costs are high and economic problems from the pandemic linger — as particularly at risk. Even though it has its own ban in place through August, New York is also a concern, because it has been especially slow at distributing rental assistance funds to the hundreds of thousands of tenants in the state who are behind on their rent.
“We’ve been circling a drain,” said KC Tenants Director Tara Raghuveer, a housing organizer in Kansas City, Mo. “On Saturday, poor and working-class tenants go down the drain in some places.”
Housing advocates are warning of awful images and hardships for many Americans who have suffered the most from Covid-19.
“My biggest concern is the dynamic of potentially tens of thousands of sheriff’s deputies and other law enforcement officials executing evictions around the country at the same time in the hottest month of the year,” said David Dworkin, president and CEO of the National Housing Conference, an affordable housing advocacy group.
About 7.4 million adult tenants reported they were behind on rent in the latest U.S. Census Bureau survey, which was taken during the last week of June and the first week of July. About 3.6 million tenant households said they were “somewhat likely” or “very likely” to face eviction over the next two months.
Others say the population of at-risk renters is much larger. The left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that 11.4 million tenants — 16 percent of adults living in rental housing — are not caught up on rent.
In six states and 31 cities, landlords have filed for more than 451,000 evictions since March 15, 2020. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
The lapse of the eviction ban, which was first imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in September as a Covid-19 safety measure, comes after landlords warned that it cost them billions of dollars each month. Industry groups including the National Association of Realtors lobbied against extending the moratorium this week and made the case to lawmakers that it "unfairly shifts economic hardships to the backs of housing providers who have jeopardized their own financial futures to provide essential housing to renters across the country."
The industry groups said the ban has been especially difficult for the mom-and-pop landlords who provide 40 percent of the country’s rental units. They "continue to pay mortgages, taxes, insurance and maintain the safety of their properties for tenants with less or, in many cases, no rental income,” the groups said in a late-night letter to lawmakers on Thursday.
The White House announced Thursday that it would not extend the moratorium because of the prospect of legal challenges, which have been spearheaded for months by landlords. The Biden administration cited a Supreme Court decision last month that kept the ban in place until July 31 but made clear that a majority of justices believed the CDC was exceeding its legal authority.
Biden urged Congress to intervene and pass a new prohibition, but at least a dozen House Democrats revolted as landlords and other housing industry groups warned of their own economic hardships.
politico.com/news/2021/07/31/eviction-moratorium-rental-assistance-biden-501917
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