Effects of ruling unclear as local advocates, landlords fear fallout,
While a federal judge on Wednesday told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that a national eviction moratorium goes beyond its authority, it remains unclear what effects the decision will have locally.
Housing advocates hope the moratorium stays in place long enough for people to take advantage of rental assistance programs.
“The CDC declaration has been a critical keystone to keeping things from being worse than they are,” said Anne Wright, chief technology officer for RentHelpPGH, an organization that helps renters obtain resources to avoid eviction.
Ms. Wright estimates some 6,000 households that applied for rental assistance programs, like those from Allegheny County or the state Department of Human Services, have yet to finish the process.
“If the CDC declaration suddenly was pulled out from under this teetering situation, you’re going to have a lot more people very suddenly ending up not able to stay where they are and absolutely no place to put them,” she said.
But the pause has also placed a burden on many landlords while they await payments from tenants who lost their jobs or whose finances were depleted due to pandemic- related closures.
“This eviction moratorium has to end sometime, because the landlords cannot afford it,” said Craig Kostalec, owner of the North Huntingdon-based Landlord Service Bureau. “You cannot target one industry and say ‘too bad.’ That’s not right.”
Mr. Kostalec expressed frustration that the state and federal government has not done more to give financial assistance to people who were out of work during the COVID-19 crisis.
“This thing [ was] so botched from the beginning that it’s going to take a monumental effort from federal and state government to take care of the people that they hurt originally, which were the tenants,” he said.
Locally, Pittsburgh City Council passed its own ban on evictions in March, but enforcement has been lax, advocates say. The Pittsburgh Union of Regional Renters said Wednesday the city’s anti-eviction ordinance “remains unenforced” and that renters are still going to court over eviction filings.
“While we seek clarity on what this [federal] ruling means, this much is clear: Tenants in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County remain at risk of eviction and death because officials chose for them to be,” the group said in a statement. “We will do everything we can to help our neighbors stay in their homes.”
The city’s moratorium also was challenged in court by the Landlord Service Bureau, with the group claiming the city overstepped the powers given to them by state law. That case is ongoing.
Jam Hammond, the executive director for the Pittsburgh Commission on Human Relations, said Wednesday there had not been any new funding provided to enforce the eviction moratorium ordinance. Last week, the commission was designated as the entity that would be in charge of enforcing the ordinance, and, so far, no violations had been reported.
The commission does not have a new staff person to handle the enforcement, he said, “so perhaps if we get a lot it could be slow going.”
“We’re getting there,” he said. “I really hope we get to a point where things are moving and people are more protected than they are today.”
More than 1,200 cases in Allegheny County are awaiting eviction hearings, Ms. Wright said. Prior to the pandemic, about 500 such cases were typically active at any given time.
More than 300 evictions are already scheduled in the county after the CDC moratorium’s scheduled end date of June 30.
If the moratorium stays in place, Ms. Wright is hopeful it could give people time to acquire resources they need through rental assistance programs.
Enough people making it through could allow landlords to get their cash flow back and provide stable ground to tenants who have been in a precarious position.
“If the CDC declaration could hang in there until we get to a pretty good saturation of people getting through that approval process, that’s what really needs to happen in order to stabilize this.”