According to this Wall Street Journal article, about 16% of adult renters live in households that are behind on rent. The Supreme Court made it clear, in its last ruling on the issue, that specific congressional authorization in the form of legislation was required in order for the eviction moratorium to be extended past the July 31st deadline.
During an appearance on CNN on Sunday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) stated that the House of Representatives should reconvene so they could do just that — extend the moratorium via legislation. She also blamed the White House as they had not requested that Congress act before the expiration of the moratorium.
Back in June, the Supreme Court ruled against a group of landlords who were seeking to end the moratorium. However, in that ruling, Justice Kavanaugh made clear that any extension beyond July 31st required action by Congress.
Therefore, Congress and Pres. Biden have had more than a month to deal with this issue.
Now that tenants are facing eviction, the blame game has begun.
While many feel sympathetic towards tenants (who, after all, will be homeless), many landlords are also suffering. After all, many might not have been paid rent since September of 2020. This is when the CDC put in place a “temporary” ban on evictions.
While this ban was in place, landlords were still responsible to pay their mortgages and property taxes as well as maintain their rental units. Many landlords are middle-class people without the deep pockets to carry these expenses for almost a year.
Meanwhile, the Federal government did put in place a program to reimburse landlords for lost rent due to this moratorium put in place due to Covid-19. While the Federal program only pays 60% of the lost rent to the landlords, that is still better than nothing, though one wonders about the constitutionality of forcing someone to take a loss by government mandate. Additionally, there were strings attached that many landlords felt were unfair. Hence the lawsuit that made it to the Supreme Court.
Unfortunately for the landlords that did want the funds, they could not apply directly for this assistance — renters had to fill out the paperwork. Further, the Biden administration did not promote this program and neither did individual states so in some cases people were not aware of the program until months after the fact.
Another inconvenient fact — although the money does not go to renters, they are still the ones that must apply. In many cases, renters did not do so despite being asked by landlords. That’s why almost all of the $46.6 billion in federal rental assistance sits undistributed. As an example, the Mississippi distribution rate is a mere 6.2% of the allocated funds.
Another facet of the problem is that rents in many areas continue to rise even though people are often out of work or are not making the same level of income as they did before Covid-19. In some cases, the rise in rents is due to immigration into the area, with new immigrants driving up rental prices.
There is also the problem, in some cases, of people mismanaging their money. There may be cases where government stimulus checks were not used to pay rent or for other necessities.
Regardless of the root cause of the problem, this has the making of a real human tragedy. Many people will be evicted through no fault of their own. Even in the cases where adults were irresponsible, their homeless and hungry children will be the innocents who suffer.
Yet blaming the landlords is not really fair. If a landlord is not paid rent, he or she may not be able to afford the mortgage on the property. In that case, he or she may lose that property.
In some cases, retired folks depend on rental income for necessities like paying their own rent or mortgage, medical bills, and so on. When that income dries up, they may be in serious trouble.
I’ve talked to friends who own rental property. A couple have had to deal with tenants who can’t pay their rent. However, fortunately, they were able to negotiate partial payments to avoid eviction. My friends in those cases did not want to kick a family out on the street as long as they were making a good faith effort to pay as much as they could manage.
Unfortunately, I am not sure how many “happy endings” we’ll see in the weeks ahead. I find myself agreeing with AOC — Congress needs to cut its recess short and quickly draft new legislation before millions of people find themselves on the street.
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This post was previously published on Publishous.
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