Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
DeSantis extends evictions ban for additional month
Gov. Ron DeSantis has extended a ban on residential evictions in Florida for another month.
Tenants and landlords statewide had anxiously waited for a decision from the governor on Monday as to whether he would extend a moratorium for a second time since it was invoked in early April.
He acted late Monday by setting a new expiration date for 12:01 a.m. on July 1.
“We’ve got a bunch of different things that are expiring,” DeSantis told a news conference in West Boca Raton last Friday. “We obviously are also going to look at Florida’s overall posture on some of the restrictions and so we’ll be having a lot of announcements over the next few days.”
The moratorium pertains to residential properties and not to commercial real estate such as office buildings, warehouses, free-standing retail shops and shopping malls.
Oscar Rivera, an attorney at the South Florida law firm of Siegfried Rivera, said Monday that clients who operate apartment buildings have not seen an outpouring of delinquencies since the coronavirus pandemic upended the economy. He surmised that is probably a result of loans and grant money flowing from the public sector to help keep businesses afloat.
“On the residential side, a lot of our clients who are owners of residential properties have been collecting a large percentage of rents,” he said.
Commercial landlords, Rivera added, have been working out delays in rent payments for those tenants who need them.
“We represent all sorts of landlords and across the board; we have not seen a significant uptick in any kinds of defaults,” he said. “People are trying to look through this situation in the most favorable way possible.”
But there are large numbers of laid off or furloughed Floridians who are running out of cash after losing their jobs to government-mandated business shutdowns triggered
by the coronavirus pandemic, according to housing analysts.
Although the state’s economy is reopening, the pace is not fast enough for a number of families and individuals to assemble the dollars they need to stay in their homes, keep cars on the road and food on the table.
In addition, a massive flood of unemployment claims that overwhelmed the state’s Department of Economic Opportunity has prevented many people from acquiring vital temporary financial relief from the state and federal governments. The state’s unemployment rate for April soared to 12.9%, the highest for any month in years.
In many instances, renters will be shielded from evictions because they get federal government subsidies or their apartments were purchased with the help of federally back loans.
Judges in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties last month issued rulings affirming federal protections for as many as 250,000 tenants in South Florida who fail to pay rent.
The orders require landlords seeking evictions for nonpayment to disclose to the court whether their tenants receive federal rent subsidies or whether the tenants’ apartments are being purchased with federally backed mortgage loans.
If either is true, those tenants cannot be removed from their apartments until at least Aug. 23, according to the Corovavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act passed in March. The act bars eviction proceedings against tenants covered by the protections for 120 days until July 25 and prohibits removal of tenants for 30 days after that date.