Evictions resume, and federal rental assistance is painfully slow
BOSTON – The eviction system, which saw a dramatic drop in cases before a federal moratorium expired over the weekend, rumbled back into action Monday, with activists girding for the first of what could be millions of tenants to be tossed onto the streets as the delta variant of the coronavirus surges.
Landlords tired of waiting for federal rental assistance were in court hoping to evict their tenants, while families from Ohio to Virginia turned up before judges hoping for a last-minute reprieve. In Detroit, at least 600 tenants with court orders against them were at immediate risk.
“It’s very scary with the moratorium being over,” said Ted Phillips, a lawyer who leads the United Community Housing Coalition in Detroit.
The Biden administration allowed the federal moratorium to expire over the weekend and Congress was unable to extend it.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for an immediate extension, calling it a “moral imperative” to prevent Americans from being put out of their homes during a COVID-19 surge.
The Biden administration had hoped that historic amounts of rental assistance allocated by Congress would help avert a crisis.
But the distribution has been painfully slow: Only about $3 billion of the first tranche of $25 billion had been distributed through June by states and localities. A second amount of $21.5 billion will go to the states.
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 U.S. said they faced eviction in the next two months, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.
In Rhode Island on Monday, Gabe Imondi, a 74-year-old landlord, was in court hoping to get an eviction execution – the final step to push a tenant out of one of four housing units he owns in nearby Pawtucket.
Imondi said he and his tenant both filed forms for the billions in federal aid meant to help keep tenants in their homes but so far, he said, he hasn’t seen a cent of the state’s $200 million share.
A retired general contractor, Imondi estimates he’s out around $20,000 in lost rent since September, when he began seeking to evict his tenant for nonpayment. The eviction was approved in January.
“I don’t know what they’re doing with that money,” Imondi said.
Meanwhile, Luis Vertentes was told by a judge he had three weeks to clear out of his one-bedroom apartment in nearby East Providence. The 43-yearold landscaper said he was four months behind on rent after being hospitalized for a time.
“I’m going to be homeless, all because of this pandemic,” Vertentes said. “I feel helpless, like I can’t do anything even though I work and I got a full-time job.”
Around the country, courts, legal advocates and law enforcement agencies were gearing up for evictions to return to pre-pandemic levels, a time when 3.7 million people were displaced from their homes every year, or seven every minute, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University.