Americans have been struggling to pay for housing
costs. In July 2020, an estimated 32 percent of
Americans missed a rent or mortgage payment.
That was up from 24 percent in April, 31 percent
in May and 30 percent in June.
This trend is worrying experts that a wave of
evictions may be coming once local, state and
federal moratoria on forced removals expire.
The eviction process itself is a barrier to
maintaining personal and public health.
Struggling to pay for housing in America is
nothing new. In 2018, the Census Bureau estimated
that 40.6 percent of renters will rent burdened,
meaning they spent 35 percent or more of their
monthly income on rent and utilities.
A study by Harvard University's Joint Center for
Housing Studies found that about a quarter of
households spent more than half their income on
housing. They're frequently having to choose
between income, food or paying for housing and
the rent always eats first.
The Urban Institute found that about a quarter of
black and Latin X renters surveyed didn't pay or
defer the rent in May 2020, compared to 14
percent of white renters.
Rents are like out of control.
I mean, people can't even afford to live in these
cities anymore. And these are people who have
good jobs.
I'm in a rent controlled apartment and the rent
is low but I didn't pay my rent because I had to
cover everything else and I have been losing
sleep, thinking and thinking. What is going to
happen when everything is open again and all the
assistance is gone? So what's going to happen?
Am I going to be making the same money as I was
making before.
With the growing uncertainty over financial
stability and the idea that mass evictions may be
looming, how do evictions actually work?
And could the U.S. cancel rent?
From 2000 to 2016, there were almost one million
evictions per year in the United States, meaning
that about 1 in 40 renter households were evicted
per year. In 2016, we saw 3.7 million eviction
filings, which is constant, 7 eviction filings
per minute. These are experiences that we're
hearing about across the country right now.
It is not just a red or a blue state issue.
It's not just an urban issue.
Along with systemic racism, rising rents and home
prices, stagnant wages, gentrification and a
decline in public and subsidized housing are
contributing to this very complex problem.
The Great Migration states so in the South,
Midwest and Rust Belt, these are often the
hot spots of evictions, and that's very much tied
to the legacy of slavery and racial
discrimination in housing.
According to census data from the 1950s to 2000,
gross rents, which includes utilities, rose from
384 dollars to 901 dollars.
By 2010, that number grew to 1,010 dollars.
And by 2018, that was 1,086 dollars.
At the same time, wages have been stagnating.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
analyzed by the Pew Research Center, suggests
that from 1964 to 2018, average hourly wages went
up from 20.27 cents to 22 dollars and 65 cents,
or just 2 dollars and 38 cents.
Combined with the loss of millions of affordable
housing units since the 1990s, a crisis has been
created for low income Americans.
For poor people and the working poor, every day's
a rainy day. They're just trying to figure out
who to pay and who not to pay.
That's that's kind of like the game that they
play every month. Just days after.
I'm just surviving.
Just living. You know.
An addiction can be one of the most emotionally
traumatizing experiences that a family has ever
had, they first receive a notice on the door that
they're going to be evicted.
That the sheriff will be coming in a matter of
days. And then if they don't leave on their own
accord, the sheriff comes in and that their
belongings are forcibly removed from the home.
This is usually happening while children and
family members are standing by and watching.
The legal process to evict a tenant can be broken
down as follows. There are five stages in
eviction. The initiation.
Some notice to tenant.
Filing of the lawsuit.
The actual hearing.
The court order. And then the sheriff execution
of that order. Some landlords engage in
intimidation tactics to get tenants to leave,
which sometimes leads to what are known as
self-help evictions.
Self-Help means a landlord has not resorted to
starting a court case, has not done the
preliminary notices, has not filed the court
cases, just literally locked out the person or
locked them out and thrown their things out as
well. This is illegal in almost every state in
the country. The landlord is subject to damages
not just for the eviction itself, but in a
separate court. The tenant can also sue for any
damages to property.
Depending on the state, a landlord may have to pay
fines, damages, and the tenants court in attorney
fees. And if a tenant wins the suit, the landlord
may be required to let the tenant stay in the
unit. It's the reason why is because 90 percent
of landlords have a lawyer and 90 percent of
tenants don't. Some universities offer law
students as representation under the tutelage of
certified law professors like the housing clinic
at Michigan State University.
I would say we get 15 calls a day.
Various things. And then we have a court program.
So we on Thursday, we're at actually at a court
where people who are being sued come in.
Which brings up questions about access to counsel
in the United States.
The Gideon case came before the Supreme Court and
it was decided at that point that if you were
facing criminal procedures, that you need a right
to an attorney. Like when someone is spread their
Miranda rights when they are arrested.
But the same right has never been afforded to
civil matters, such as matters of housing matters
and public health.
To fight against this, some cities have enacted
access to counsel initiatives.
The American Bar Association passed a resolution
almost a decade ago in favor of the right to
civil right to counsel.
And it's a movement that I think is largely
growing. We don't have any states that have
adopted it yet at the state level, but there are
numerous cities that have adopted a civil right
to counsel, especially in housing, and have
demonstrated that just that one intervention
resulted in upwards of 80 percent of cases, not
resulting in a sheriffs enforcement of an order.
Keep in mind that most of the programs that
provide free lawyers are for very low income
people. It does not include working poor.
So, you know, there limitations on the income
levels.
Evictions can have serious repercussions on the
tenants and the community at large.
We call it the Scarlet E because when you've gone
through the eviction process, it ruins your
credit. And often it can cause you to be
blacklisted by other landlords.
The major credit bureaus took action to try to
solve this. Back in 2017, the three credit
bureaus, the major ones, Experian, Equifax and
TransUnion, and they got together and they no
longer reported for evictions on credit reports.
But it hasn't stopped the label from following
tenants who have been evicted.
Credit bureaus aren't necessarily reporting that
you had an eviction on your record, but there
is, you have the ability to search the records.
And there are numerous companies that have popped
up across the country for the sole purpose of
calling through eviction records to make that
available to property owners.
So you can pay those companies to search the
record for you to determine if this applicant for
tenancy is on one of those lists.
So it becomes very difficult to find housing once
you have been evicted.
So it also increases the rate of homelessness and
other traumatic events and experiences.
According to a White House report from 2019, over
500000 people are homeless in the U.S.
on any given night. 65 percent of those are
sheltered, while the other 35 percent are on the
streets. And a recent report by Amherst Capital
Management found that 28 million renters who
don't own their homes or receive financial
assistance are at risk of eviction.
But tenants aren't the only ones to suffer when
rent isn't paid. The rent itself has ripple
effects for the entire community when the rent
isn't paid. The mortgages isn't paid, property
taxes go unpaid employees are unpaid.
Conditions that needed repairs are delayed, and
the entire community ends up suffering from the
school system to services that the community
provides to residents.
It's probably a bit more difficult for the smaller
landlord. One of the things that we've been
working on internally and with our peers in the
space is putting forth a proposal to Washington,
to Treasury and HUD.
That's really a civil program for short term
liquidity relief, designed much like a long term
interest free loan administered through the tax
system. So that's something that we'll continue
to work on for the benefit of all renters.
The 47 million households in the US that rent
today. A May survey by the American Apartment
Owners Association found that nearly 60 percent
of landlords said their tenants are unable to pay
rent because of the coronavirus, and 80 percent
said they're willing to work with their tenants.
We made it pretty clear to our landlords that
people aren't just suddenly going to be able to
afford to pay back everything they owe on one
day, right. So it doesn't make sense to create a
plan that isn't realistic.
Landlords can use their insurance for things like
natural disasters, but Covid-19 has not been
deemed one. In a Martian McLennan report showed
that insurance rates are going up amid the
pandemic because companies are seeing it as a
higher risk. The American Apartment Owners
Association said there was something that
landlords can do to ease some of that burden.
They can get something called lease guarantee so
that if later the tenants can't pay their rent
or, you know, there's excessive damages or
something like that, they have some coverage for
that. And we call it a security deposit
alternative. So it allows people to not have to
pay a full security deposit.
And then, you know, the landlord is protected for
thousands of dollars just in case something
happens down the road.
It is a small fee that the tenant has to pay to
get it, but it is definitely less than a security
deposit would be.
I am also announcing that the Department of
Housing and Urban Development is providing
immediate relief to renters and homeowners by
suspending all foreclosures and evictions until
the end of April. The president was referring to
an amendment of the CARES Act, which provides
eviction relief for tenants in federally backed
housing for 120days.
And the notice must give tenants 30 days to leave
the property. You can look on the Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac Web sites to see if your apartment
buildings, mortgages is federally backed and even
if they're not, the eviction lab has a policy
scorecard which is constantly updating
information on states housing policy during the
pandemic. The most important thing to know is
that there are lots of holes.
The eviction moratoria are probably best
described as a patchwork.
So there are some places around the country where
there are little to no protections in place from
eviction. On June 29, Hud's Federal Housing
Finance Agency extended the ability for
multi-family property owners that already had
forbearance agreements, an extra three months of
forbearance with the requirement that landlords
give the tenant at least a 30 day notice to
vacate, not charge the tenant late fees or
penalties for nonpayment of rent and allowed
tenant flexibility to repay back rent over time
and not in a lump sum.
Because of this patchwork, the House of
Representatives passed the Emergency Housing
Protections and Relief Act of 2020, which would
appropriate 100 billion dollars for direct rental
assistance. Something that was not expressly
written into the 2.2 trillion dollar Carers Act.
The bill passed by the House House, a companion
bill in the Senate. But both bills are not
expected to pass in the upper chamber.
Even though President Trump says he supports
larger payments to Americans than Democrats in
the next coronavirus relief bill, a movement also
developed to hashtag cancel rent.
All across the country, from Los Angeles,
Philadelphia to New York.
Tens of thousands of tenants banded together in
the largest coordinated rent strike in decades.
Workers are staging protests nationwide and as
International Workers Day, also known as May
Day. In Congress, Representative Ellen Omar
introduced the Rent and Mortgage Cancelation Act
of 2020 to cancel rent until 30 days after the
pandemic is over. Today, I'm excited to introduce
a bill to cancel all rent and hold mortgage
payments through the duration of this spending.
The bill has 30 co-sponsors in the House, but is
still waiting for a vote in the House Financial
Services Committee. No matter where I was or what
I was doing. I could always come here.
This was home. But let's wait and see what
happens. As Americans wait for a possible next
step from Washington, experts suggest people who
are concerned about their rent speak with their
landlords. You know, this is difficult for
everyone involved.
And we're really trying to encourage as much
cooperation, and that goes both ways.
So I think it's really important that tenants
talk to their landlords if they're having a
problem. To be honest with them.
And for landlords at the same time to not think
the worst. And to also have an open mind and work
with their tenants as well.
If they can.