Court extends eviction ban to May 18.
The Texas Supreme Court issued an emergency order Tuesday extending the state’s moratorium on residential evictions to May 18.
Although the new order prohibits trials, hearings and other eviction procedures, it still allows landlords to file for eviction, although some municipalities including Austin have set local ordinances in place to suspend eviction filings as well. The city of Houston and Bexar County have not.
The federal government has also extended until August 23 the CARE Act’s moratorium on eviction filings for renters whose landlords have mortgages backed or owned by the federal government, which accounts for a quarter of rental properties in the country.
“I think in an ideal world there would be one policy that all renters would follow,” said Christina Rosales, deputy director of the Austinbased affordable housing advocacy group Texas Housers. “Right now what’s happening is there is a patchwork of solutions that are not universal for people and people don’t know where they fall.”
According to the group’s research, there are 3.7 million renter households in Texas, and about half of them are low-income — over 850,000 spend more than 50 percent of their income on monthly rent.
Service workers in restaurants and hospitality industries have been especially hit hard as the number of unemployment claims has surged in Texas. Over the past five weeks, 1.3 million unemployment claims have been filed — equal to the total number of claims in 2019.
“When you think about what that means for people who rent their homes, that means they don’t have a reliable
“I think in an ideal world there would be one policy that all renters would follow.”
Christina Rosales, deputy director, Texas Housers
source of income that they have had in the past,” Rosales said. “The extension was set to expire on Thursday, and with rent due May 1st, I think this is a pretty common sense measure that the Supreme Court has made, because there's just no way that a lot of renters that have lost income and lost work are going to be able to make that May 1st payment.”
More than half of Houstonians rent their homes, though only about 41,000 of those rentals are federally backed and protected by the CARE Act’s August deadline, said Zoe Middleton, the Houston-based co-director of Texas Housers.
“Time is really ticking on the creation of a rental relief program at the city of Houston, you know we have 20 days to figure this out and we’ve known there was going to be a rental crisis since the beginning part of March,” she said.
The state high court’s eviction moratorium was originally set to expire on April 19; this is the second time it has been extended.