Money For U.S. Housing Despite Top Court Nixing Evictions Ban

Congress is on the verge of significantly increasing the country’s investment in its housing stock as millions of renters face the threat of eviction, Sarah Kleiner reported for the Center for Public Integrity (CPI).

Photo Insert: The US Supreme Court has now joined the fray over who gets the final say on the evictions ban.

Late Thursday night, a divided US Supreme Court sided with landlords who claimed the federal government overstepped its bounds by placing a moratorium on evictions in 2020.

The decision leaves millions of people suffering from job loss and illness at risk of losing their homes.

Meanwhile, Congress has signaled a push to address the nation’s housing crisis. Earlier this week, the US House of Representatives passed a $3.5 trillion spending plan that includes as much as $339 billion for the committee overseeing housing and banking issues to divide on programs.

The budget resolution had already been passed by the Senate on August 11. The Senate’s version called for spending $332 billion on housing and transportation initiatives. Now the respective House and Senate committees will figure out how to divvy up the pots of money, assigning dollar figures to specific programs.

Regardless of how the pie is sliced, advocates say, it will boost housing dollars — and that comes at a critical time. The nation was already in the throes of an affordable housing crisis before the COVID-19 pandemic, but widespread illness and job loss have caused the problem to cascade, largely at the expense of communities of color.

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