A housing ‘apocalypse’ is coming as coronavirus protections across the country expirePublished Wed, Jun 10 20204:19 PM EDT
Alicia Adamczyk@ALICIAADAMCZYKA woman walks past a wall bearing a graffiti asking for rent forgiveness in Los Angeles, California.
VALERIE MACON
If you or someone you know is facing eviction, CNBC Make It would like to hear from you. Please email money reporter Alicia Adamczyk at [email protected].Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. was experiencing what housing experts and advocates deemed an eviction crisis.
More than 2 million people face eviction each year, far more than the number of people who faced foreclosure at the height of the 2008 mortgage crisis.
Experts expect the eviction crisis to get far worse in the coming months. The Covid-19 economic recession has hit renters especially hard. They
make up a disproportionate share of service sector jobs, an industry that has been decimated as a result of the coronavirus shutdowns.
In fact, between March 25 and April 10 of this year,
nearly half of renters aged 18 to 64 reported that they were having trouble paying their rent or utilities, were
food insecure or couldn’t afford needed medical care, according to the Urban Institute.
Thousands of tenants have been missing rent payments over the past few months. People of color have fared worse than white renters due to the
disproportionate job loss in their communities, the Urban Institute reports. About 25% of black and Latino renters
reported not paying or deferring rent in May, compared to 14% of white renters.
To keep people in their homes, the federal government banned evictions in federally assisted properties through July 25, and some cities and states, including Massachusetts, New York and Michigan, put their own
temporary eviction moratoriums in place. But
many of those bans begin expiring this month depending on the state, according to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, which tracks evictions across the country.
Plus, the
extra $600 per week in federal unemployment benefits is
set to expire at the end of July. That extra money is “what has been allowing many people who have lost their jobs to continue paying rent,” Solomon Greene, a senior fellow in housing policy at the Urban Institute, tells
CNBC Make It. Coupled with the end of eviction moratoriums, the U.S. is likely to experience an uptick in evictions nationwide in the coming weeks.
Evicting people in the middle of a global health crisis puts them at greater risk of contracting and spreading Covid-19, turning “a catastrophe into an apocalypse,” Aaron Carr, founder and executive director of the Housing Rights Initiative, tells CNBC Make It.
“A lot of people could be on the streets,” says Carr. “Especially in places like New York City that already have a homeless problem, it could turn into a homeless nightmare.”
Eviction also has long-term — in some cases, multi-generational — financial consequences for individuals and families, Alieza Durana, a writer with the Eviction Lab, tells CNBC Make It. It can ruin a tenant’s credit for many years, making it harder for them to find a new place to live. It also takes a
mental and emotional toll on those affected, and hits minority communities,
particularly women of color and
their children, especially hard.
The human toll that an eviction takes on a person and family and community is really devastating.
Alieza Durana
THE EVICTION LAB
“The human toll that an eviction takes on a person and family and community is really devastating,” says Durana, noting that tenants who are evicted often experience
job loss and higher rates of depression, among other issues.
And that’s before you add a global health crisis to the mix.
“Housing instability has huge health consequences even when we’re not facing a pandemic,” says Greene. “Exposure risk is so much more amplified and worsened when you can’t shelter in place because you don’t have a place to shelter.”