Up To 15M Americans Face Eviction As Moratorium Ends

Tenants saddled with months of back rent are facing the end of the federal eviction moratorium, a move that could lead to millions being forced from their homes just as the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus is rapidly spreading, Michael Casey reported for the Associated Press (AP).

Photo Insert: Abandoned personal belongings

The Biden administration announced Thursday it would allow the nationwide ban to expire, saying it wanted to extend it due to rising infections but its hands were tied after the US Supreme Court signaled in June that it wouldn’t be extended beyond the end of July without congressional action.

House lawmakers on Friday attempted but failed, to pass a bill to extend the moratorium even for a few months. Some Democratic lawmakers had wanted it extended until the end of the year.

More than 15 million people live in households that owe as much as $20 billion to their landlords, according to the Aspen Institute. As of July 5, roughly 3.6 million people in the US said they faced eviction in the next two months, according to the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.

The moratorium, put in place by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in September to try to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, is credited with keeping 2 million people in their homes over the past year as the pandemic battered the economy, according to the Princeton University’s Eviction Lab.

Eviction moratoriums will remain in place in New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois, California and Washington, D.C., until they expire later this year. Elsewhere, the end of the federal moratorium means evictions could begin Monday, leading to a years’ worth of evictions over several weeks and ushering in the worst housing crisis since the Great Recession.

The crisis will only get worse in September when the first foreclosure proceedings are expected to begin. An estimated 1.75 million homeowners — roughly 3.5% of all homes — are in some sort of forbearance plan with their banks, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

By comparison, about 10 million homeowners lost their homes to foreclosure after the housing bubble burst in 2008. The Biden administration had hoped that historic amounts of rental assistance allocated by Congress in December and March would help avert an eviction crisis.

But so far, only about $3 billion of the first tranche of $25 billion had been distributed through June by states and localities. Another $21.5 billion will go to the states. The speed of disbursement picked up in June, but some states like New York have distributed almost nothing. Several others have only approved a few million dollars.

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