Renters brace for evictions as moratorium ends
Cities across the country are bracing for a surge of
evictions as a four-month federal moratorium that has protected millions expires
Friday.
By KATY
O'DONNELL
07/24/2020
07:13 PM EDT
Columbus,
Ohio, has turned part of its convention center into an evictions court. Denver
is creating a handful of designated campsites for homeless people. And
Milwaukee saw a 17 percent increase in eviction filings last month after a
state ban lapsed.
Cities across
the country are bracing for a surge of evictions as a four-month federal
moratorium that has protected millions of tenants from losing their homes in
the middle of the pandemic expires Friday at midnight, with no relief in sight
from Congress.
The ban is
ending just as a federal enhancement to unemployment benefits — a $600-a-week
boost that has helped many laid off tenants pay at least some of their rent —
also lapses this weekend. Estimates of the number of people who stand to lose their
homes are rough, given the patchwork of state and local bans on evictions, many
of which are also expiring. But they range in the millions, and a
disproportionate share of them are people of color.
“The wave
of evictions has already begun, and now Congress needs to act to prevent it
from becoming a tsunami,” said Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National
Low Income Housing Coalition.
“If the
federal ban is not extended, if the state and local eviction moratoriums that
are scheduled to expire in the coming weeks do, and if no emergency rental
assistance is provided, then from the end of August through fall, millions of
Americans will be evicted from their homes,” Yentel said.
The federal
eviction ban, included in the $2 trillion CARES Act legislation passed by
Congress in March, covers all tenants living in buildings that have mortgages
guaranteed by the U.S. government. It does not provide help to the majority of
tenants who live in buildings with privately backed mortgages.
While
states have imposed their own eviction moratoriums, 24 of them have already
allowed the temporary bans to lapse. That leaves somewhere between 19 million
and 23 million people — about one in five renters in the U.S. — at risk of
eviction by the end of September if Congress fails to extend both the federal
ban and supplemental unemployment benefits, according to an estimate by the
Aspen Institute.
The
situation was dire even before both protections lapsed: Roughly 9.4 million
renters have no confidence they will be able to make next month’s rent payment,
according to the latest weekly survey by the Census Bureau, conducted the
second week of July. Another 14.3 million have only “slight” confidence they
will be able to make rent next month.
Congressional
Democrats have been pushing for rental relief. The House late last month passed
an emergency housing bill from Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters
(D-Calif.) that would extend the federal eviction ban until March 2021 and
allocate $100 billion for rental assistance. The bill had been part of the $3
trillion rescue package that House Democrats passed in May.
In the
Senate, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the top Democrat on the Banking Committee,
introduced a companion bill to the Waters legislation. And Sen. Elizabeth
Warren (D-Mass.) also proposed legislation extending the ban through March
2021.
The
Republican-controlled Senate has not taken up any of the bills.
After talks
with the White House on the next economic rescue package stalled on Thursday,
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Republicans would release their
proposal for the legislation “early next week.” But GOP lawmakers are still
split over unemployment benefits, and the leadership has not made rent relief a
priority.
Brown on
Thursday excoriated McConnell on the Senate floor for letting the House
moratorium bill “collect dust” on his desk.
“Right now,
millions of Americans are in danger of losing their homes,” Brown said. “The
last thing we need in the middle of a public health crisis is families being
turned out on the streets.”
The Senate
adjourned hours later, allowing the federal ban — which covers about 12 million
households — to expire as scheduled on Friday.
There’s
still a grace period, though. Under the CARES Act, landlords who were subject
to the ban must give tenants 30 days’ notice before filing eviction papers in
court.
“Families
won’t actually be pushed out of their homes until the end of August, so there
is still an ever-closing window where Congress can act,” said Yentel, who is
leading a coalition of housing groups to pressure lawmakers for additional
relief.
Relief
efforts so far have prevented a dramatic drop-off in rent payments, despite
tens of millions of Americans losing their jobs: 91.3 percent of apartment
households had made a full or partial rent payment for this month as of July
20, according to the National Multifamily Housing Council — down just 2.1
percentage points from this time last year, and roughly in line with the 92.2
percent who had paid by mid-June.
But that’s
sure to change quickly if Congress fails to reinstate the $600-per-week
supplemental unemployment benefit after it lapses.
With the
current benefits, just 3 percent of renter households are “severely housing
burdened,” meaning they pay more than 50 percent of their incomes toward rent,
according to a Zillow analysis of rental households impacted by the crisis
released on Thursday. Losing the federal benefit, even if state unemployment
benefits hold steady, would cause the severely burdened share of tenants to
skyrocket to 41 percent, Zillow found.
“Right now,
we're in a situation where people will be evicted from their homes,” said House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi in an MSNBC interview Friday. “People will be on the
street, and people are hungry. This is the United States of America. So let's
find out how we can work together to go forward.”
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