Rents are soaring for millions as eviction threat looms
Rents are soaring in many U.S. cities as the economy rebounds, squeezing the budgets of tenants who also face an increased risk of eviction after a judge blocked a federal moratorium on the practice Wednesday.
There’s no single indicator that captures a complex national picture, as COVID-19 drove major shifts in where people live and work. Still, tight markets are apparent in much of the country.
The median monthly charge on a vacant rental jumped $185 in March from a year earlier, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. A national index compiled by Apartmentlist.com shows that rents rose 1.9 percent in April alone, the most in data going back to 2017.
The rising costs will pile pressure on poorer families who are more likely to rent — and less likely to be earning money right now, in a recovery that has seen betterpaid jobs bounce back faster. For low-income Americans, shelter accounts for 40 percent of spending.
Adding another risk, a federal judge blocked a nationwide eviction moratorium that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention established last year as COVID-19 lockdowns put millions of renters out of work.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich in Washington ruled Wednesday that the CDC had exceeded its authority by issuing a broad
moratorium on evictions across all rental properties.
The ban, due to last through June, had loopholes that allowed some evictions to proceed — but it still offered protection for those who’d lost their jobs. About 24 percent of renters, roughly 8 million people, have missed at least one housing payment since March 2020, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.
Eviction back on table
In recent months, others judges issued more limited rulings blocking the ban in certain jurisdictions. Friedrich’s decision goes further, saying the entire ban should be overturned nationwide.
The ruling is a setback to efforts by President Joe Biden to help renters and unwind the financial stress caused by the pandemic. The CDC moratorium, first enacted by President Donald Trump and later extended by Biden, was designed to prevent mass evictions in the face of a public health emergency that has seen millions of Americans lose their jobs and fall deep into debt.
The Justice Department immediately moved to appeal the decision.
“Scientific evidence shows that evictions exacerbate the spread of COVID-19,” said Brian Boynton, the acting assistant attorney general for the civil division. “The harm to the public that would result from unchecked evictions cannot be undone.”
Eric Dunn, director of litigation at the National Housing Law Project, said the U.S. should move quickly to overturn the ruling or risk “mass evictions just as we seem to be on the verge of reaching herd immunity in the U.S.”
But landlord groups welcomed the judge’s decision. Paula Cino, vice president for construction, development and land use policy at the National Multifamily Housing Council, said the country is in a far different place than it was early in the pandemic. By continuing the CDC moratorium, she said, the federal government was “ignoring the progress made.”
Rapid rebound
The early months of the pandemic saw a headlinegrabbing decline in prices for some expensive urban markets such as Manhattan and San Francisco. Higherincome workers were able to move out of city-center apartments to work remotely from somewhere else.
One result was a lot of unoccupied high-end properties in such places. That may have exaggerated the jump in median costs for vacant rentals as measured by the Census Bureau, creating what’s called a “compositional effect” that skews the data, according to Chris Salvati, a housing economist at Apartmentlist.com.
The declines in some regions offset gains elsewhere and kept national measures fairly steady last year, Salvati said. But he now sees prices rising in all the places where they fell last year — and pretty much everywhere else too.
“I’ve been surprised at how quickly things have rebounded over these past couple of months,” he said.
The latest monthly survey by Fannie Mae suggests Americans expect the median increase in rent to be 5.3 percent this year, close to the highest in the past decade.