Legal and housing experts predict a ‘tsunami of evictions’ as more Americans become unable to pay rent, housing costs

As the coronavirus pandemic rages on and continues to complicate nearly every system of bureaucracy, housing instability becomes an even greater threat to residents facing job and income loss and renters facing impending expirations on rent moratorium orders.

At the pandemic’s beginning in March, most states enacted safer-at-home orders that sequester workers to their homes, resulting in about 50 million households that suffered (and continue to experience) job or income loss due to COVID-19.

To make matters worse for renters, many state moratoriums on evictions are set to expire in August.

The Congressional CARES Act that provided financial assistance put forth a 120-day eviction moratorium on tenants in federally-subsidized homes in April and is set to expire July 25.

On Friday, July 17, experts in housing policy, medicine and law spoke to ethnic media representatives in a press briefing to unpack the inevitable “tsunami of evictions” that’ll put 28 million renters in danger of losing their homes.

“At a time when sheltering in place is paramount to stabilizing the United States and controlling the pandemic, our country is on the brink of a housing crisis of unprecedented magnitude and with no safety net beneath us,” said Emily A. Benfer, the director of the Health Justice Clinic at Wake Forest School of Law and co-creator of the COVID-19 Housing Policy Scoreboard at Princeton University.

Before the pandemic even began, the nation was already facing a housing crisis with 25.5 million families at risk of losing their homes, Benfer explained, and only 25% of those families were eligible for housing subsidies.

On average, seven evictions were filed every minute in 2016 when the national unemployment rate was 4.7%. The national unemployment rate in April was just under 15% and has since dropped to 11.1%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But the decline in the unemployment rate is expected to increase again as the COVID-19 case numbers continue to spike across the country, forcing state and national leaders to consider implementing stronger safer-at-home orders to help mitigate the virus.

“To put this in perspective, 10 million people were displaced from their homes over the course of years following the foreclosure crisis in 2008. We are on track to surpass that number in just four months,” Benfer said.

Renters in communities of color are particularly at risk, especially Black and Latino households, Benfer noted. Medical policy experts over the last few months have unanimously found that job loss, income insecurity as well as positive transmission of the disease have disproportionately affected the Black community.

This makes the need for additional financial assistance and renters’ protections not just an issue of government responsibility to its people but a race and generational concern, as well.

Margot Kushel, director of the Center for Vulnerable Populations at UC San Francisco, said that children of renters are also a drastically affected class, pointing out that the loss of a home — and the stress that causes — will lead to disturbance in education and overall mental and emotional well-being.

Kushel also expects a 20% to 40% increase in homelessness if these moratoriums expire.
In California, a state that has for years suffered its own pressing housing issue, lawmakers have put forth efforts to address homelessness during COVID-19 like Project Homekey, a $600 million state-funded program designed to buy hotels and motels to house people on the streets.

“But this will be a drop in the bucket for people who are currently experiencing homelessness and will not address the new inflows of homelessness,” Kushel said, sharing that these long-term solutions that will actually lower the homelessness rate in California rely on increasing affordable housing and expanding financial support and protections for renters.

Nevertheless, motel and hotel conversion is a proven model that has helped the homeless community in the past. In 2015, Akash Kalia converted his father’s hotel in Santa Rosa, California into a shelter that housed the homeless in his community.

Among industries afflicted by the pandemic, the hospitality industry took a major hit, but Kalia offered a solution for hotel and motel owners whose businesses have suffered immensely.

He was able to house individuals for about $13,000 per year and provide support services like rehabilitation and mental health care.

“Hotel owners in California have the ability to salvage their livelihoods by really accepting this model,” he said. “None of us know how long the hospitality industry is going to be hit, and this is a way for hotel owners to maintain business viability and also provide a social good for the most vulnerable population.”

California currently has the largest homeless population in the country, comprising 22% of the nation’s homeless — about 150,000 people, according to a 2018 tally from the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness. Additionally, 45% of Californians are renters and, cognizant of this, Governor Gavin Newsom earlier this month extended the state’s eviction moratorium to Sept. 30.

But the current state of housing instability and tenants’ protections brings forward the inequities of existing housing and renting policy that favors landlords over renters, said Nisha Vyas, senior attorney at the Western Center for Law and Poverty.

Landlords are represented by attorneys while most tenants are not and don’t have the resources for legal representation. More than 75% of eviction lawsuits (for which tenants must file responses within five days) are filed and settled within 45 days, a system that favors landlords’ need for efficient removal of tenants over the renters who risk being homeless.

At the highest risk, Vyas said, are low-income households where 90% of the overall income goes towards paying rent.

“The process is designed to be very efficient and to provide consistent results for landlords to be able to eject tenants and recover their properties. There’s often very little regard for the outcome of tenants,” Vyas explained.

Currently, a bill that would establish a process for tenants to pay back owed rent is in the California Senate Judiciary committee pending approval. AB 1436 would also allow landlords to seek legal intervention on unpaid rent by way of civil action instead of evictions as well as restrict the influence of evictions on a renter’s credit history.

Vyas continued, “Evictions have played a significant role in creating California’s affordable housing crisis and our homelessness crisis. We’ve talked about the eviction crisis as a tsunami and that metaphor is intended to capture the magnitude of the crisis but this is not a natural disaster. It’s a disaster of our own making. To prevent it, we need to advocate for meaningful governmental intervention.” (Klarize Medenilla/AJPress)