Evictions loom after Supreme Court ruling
In the Atlanta area, thousands of eviction filings have piled up in court, ready to be processed. In New York, renters are waiting months for rental assistance to arrive and running out of time. In North Dakota, a legal aid nonprofit has 10 attorneys to cover 70,000 square miles, and evictions are already far outpacing lawyers’ ability to help.
Similar scenes are playing out across the United States, but this waiting game for millions of Americans could soon end.
A new Supreme Court ruling issued Thursday night is unleashing a rapid and uneven torrent of evictions across the United States, leaving the fate of millions of Americans in the hands of local judges, sheriffs and political leaders.
In some communities, the decision — coupled with agonizingly slow rental relief programs — has left thousands of people who are behind on their rent immediately exposed. Some local judges are restarting cases that had been held up by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention eviction ban the Supreme Court struck down.
In areas with hot housing markets and thin renter protections, tenant advocates braced for judges to finalize stacks of nearly completed evictions and order the local marshal or sheriff’s office to remove scores of people from their homes in short order.
“I don’t know if they’ll have time to process them today but certainly by next week. There are going to be thousands,” said Lindsey Siegel, director of housing advocacy at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, on Friday.
Siegel said of the five counties in and around Atlanta only one, DeKalb, still has any pandemic protections in place. She said landlords have been eager to see more evictions approved after filing thousands of notices during the pandemic.
“We have this combination of a tight rental market, eviction laws that are friendly to landlords and this culture of serial eviction filing where landlords are quick to go to court the moment the tenant is late on their rent. Even the day they’re late,” she said.
In other jurisdictions — including at least eight states where some protections remain in place — tenants still have time to catch up on their rent. The office of California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom reassured tenants in a tweet late Thursday that “California renters will NOT be impacted by this news” because the state has its own protections in place until Oct. 1.
But renters in places with eviction bans in place may still lose their homes if rental relief continues to be slow to arrive. Less than 11 percent of the $46.5 billion Emergency Rental Assistance Program, first approved by Congress and then-President Donald Trump in December, had been given to renters by the end of July.
Housing officials and legal advocates in New York, Atlanta and other areas say they are doing all they can to get aid to renters quickly. But experts said that in too many cases the state and federal aid programs have not moved fast enough to get money to renters before the Supreme Court’s decision, leaving many people in a perilous situation.
“We’re really facing a tragedy of monumental and historic proportions,” said Ronald S. Flagg, president of the Legal Services Corporation, a legal aid group.
“It’s quite akin to people starving with enormous caches of food sitting at food banks near them, but for whatever reason the food not getting distributed,” Flagg said. “It’s really a sad commentary on the country.”