Millions of Americans could find themselves homeless starting yesterday as a nationwide ban on evictions expires, against a backdrop of surging COVID-19 cases and political fingerpointing.
With billions in government funds meant to help renters still untapped, US President Joe Biden last week urged the US Congress to extend the 11-month-old moratorium after a recent US Supreme Court ruling meant the White House could not do so.
However, Republicans balked at Democratic efforts to extend the eviction ban through the middle of October, and the US House of Representatives adjourned for its summer vacation on Friday without renewing it.
US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Twitter on Saturday that blocking the measure was “an act of pure cruelty ... leaving children and families out on the streets.”
Several left-wing Democrats had spent the night outside the US Capitol in protest — calling out their colleagues over the failure to act.
“We slept at the Capitol last night to ask them to come back and do their jobs. Today’s their last chance,” said US Representative Cori Bush, who has herself experienced homelessness and was joined by fellow progressive US representatives Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley.
With the clock ticking down to yesterday, the country was braced for a heartbreaking spectacle — families with their belongings at the curbside wondering where to go.
One of those at risk was Terriana Clark, who was living out of a car with her husband and two stepchildren for much of last year, before finding a teaching job and an apartment in Harvey, Louisiana.
Jobless again and struggling to pay rent after a bout of illness, the 27-year-old told the New Orleans Advocate that she applied to a local assistance program four months ago, but is still waiting for help.
“If it comes, it comes. If it don’t, it don’t,” she told the paper. “It’s going to be too late for a lot of people. A lot of people are going to be outside.”
Unlike other pandemic-related aid that was distributed from Washington, such as stimulus checks, it was states, counties and cities that were responsible for building programs from the ground up to dole out assistance earmarked for renters.
The US Department of the Treasury said that as of June, only US$3 billion in aid had reached households out of the US$25 billion sent to states and localities in early February, less than three weeks after Biden took office.
Pelosi in another Twitter post on Saturday urged “state and local governments to immediately disburse the $46.5 billion in emergency rental assistance approved by the Democratic Congress so that many families can avoid eviction.”
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ordered the eviction moratorium in September last year as the world’s largest economy lost more than 20 million jobs amid the pandemic shutdowns. The CDC feared homelessness would boost COVID-19 infections.
Although more than half of those jobs were since recovered, many families still have not caught up on missed rent payments.
The US Census Bureau’s latest Household Pulse survey showed that of 51 million renters surveyed, 7.4 million were behind on rent and nearly half of those said they risked being evicted in the next two months.
Nearly 80 percent of households that are behind on their rent as of early last month lived in COVID-19 hot spots, according to a study by the Jain Family Institute.
“Putting people out on the street is probably not going to have good effects on community transmission rates,” the institute’s housing policy researcher Paul Williams told CBS MoneyWatch.
Immediately after taking over, the Biden administration had eased paperwork and eligibility requirements for an emergency rental assistance program, but it has stressed that management remains in the hands of state and local officials.
“There can be no excuse for any state or locality not accelerating funds to landlords and tenants that have been hurt during this pandemic,” Biden said on Friday.
The eviction moratorium and other protections prevented an estimated 2.2 million eviction filings since March last year, said Peter Hepburn, a research fellow at the Eviction Lab at Princeton University.
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