Evictions Skyrocket After COVID-Era Protections Expire
Making things harder, rents have grown by 30.5 percent since 2019
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Since the federal ban on COVID-era evictions ended on 21 October, 2021, evictions have shot up across the U.S. and by as much as 50 percent in some cities.
Many people who were kept housed by the moratorium still have not replaced their pre-COVID incomes and now face rents that have gone up as much as 50 percent since the ban was imposed.
The $46.5 billion in emergency rental assistance Congress also allotted during the COVID War has been spent.
As a result, homelessness is on the rise.
“The federal moratorium is obviously over and emergency rental assistance money has dried up in most places,” researcher Daniel Grubbs-Donovan at Princeton University’s Eviction Lab told the Associated Press.
“Across the country, low-income renters are in an even worse situation than before [COVID] due to massive increases in rent during [COVID], inflation, and other financial difficulties,” he added.
The lab tracks evictions in more than 35 cities in 10 states.
Eviction filings are more than 50 percent higher than in 2019 in Houston and Minneapolis, among other cities. The rate was 35 percent higher in Nashville, 33 percent greater in Phoenix, and the rate in the state of Rhode Island grew by 32 percent.
Princeton’s lab estimated overall U.S. evictions were up 78.6 percent in 2022, year on year, after eviction bans were lifted.
Making things harder, rents have grown by 30.5 percent since 2019, real estate website Zillow reported.
The U.S. is short 7.3 million units of affordable housing, according to the National Low Income Housing.
Forty of New York state’s 62 counties counted more evictions last year than in 2019; in two counties, the number more than doubled.
Housing advocates urged the state’s legislature to limit rent increases to 3 percent annually or 1.5 times the rate of inflation but lawmakers failed to do so.
Texas saw a record 270,000 evictions in 2022 after COVID-era protections disappeared, the AP said. At the same time, housing prices skyrocketed as Austin, Dallas, and other Texas cities welcomed a wave of footloose remote workers.
However, some states and cities have extended support for troubled tenants.
More than 200 measures have been enacted, including legal representation for tenants facing eviction, sealing eviction records, and mandatory mediation to divert disputes from courts, the National Low Income Housing Coalition reported.
These and similar measures have kept evictions 41 percent below 2019 levels in New York City and 33 percent in Philadelphia, where 70 percent of the more than 5,000 eviction cases were resolved without courts. Philly also allotted $30 million in rental aid.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This new wave of people who have no secure place to live makes Gerald Celente’s homelessness solution even more urgent.
Instead of warehousing and hiding homeless people in shelters, Celente’s plan would provide these individuals the opportunity to get out of the cities and into rural facilities run on the model of Boys Town, the famous village in Nebraska.
The U.S. has countless locations that are not far from major cities that would be suitable for Homeless Towns.
For example, in New York’s Catskill Mountains, the area once famously known as the “Borscht Belt,” or “Jewish Alps” where there were thriving lovely hotels and famous celebrity hang outs… they are now empty or demolished, and the area is now largely underpopulated.
These lovely country locations would be conducive to self-sustaining villages where the currently homeless could live in clean, safe environments and, while receiving needed treatment, learn to work with their hands and minds while helping to solve the worsening homeless crisis.
Pilot programs already are underway.
A New Mexico city has proposed spending $1 million to buy three acres of land that could be the site of a 200,000-square-foot facility to house homeless veterans. A private charity in New Hampshire bought a farm to house homeless veterans with mental illness while they receive treatment and learn farming skills.