OPINION: America’s Eviction Mess, Part One

This story appeared on StrongTown.org on August 9, 2021

Since early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the CDC has ordered a federal moratorium on evictions from rental housing for nonpayment of rent. Depending on when you’re reading this and even where you’re reading this, I have no idea if that is still true for you.

You can be forgiven if you have whiplash from this week’s headlines. As of July 31, the federal moratorium officially expired, amid outcry from tenants’ advocates and some members of Congress. On August 3, the Biden Administration announced a new emergency set of limits on evictions effective through October 3, applying to counties severely impacted by COVID-19 (which is most counties right now, thanks to the surging Delta variant).

Here’s a good roundup of the details from NPR.

The CDC’s moratorium was never the only game in town: many cities and states instituted their own pandemic-era restrictions on eviction. And in the wake of the federal expiration, some places scrambled to create or strengthen emergency local bans.

Here’s what this post is not going to be about: the legal or political prospects of the eviction ban. Does the CDC, a public health agency, have the right to make sweeping housing policy at all? Is the latest extension illegal, as the Supreme Court indicated in June? (Every advocate of the extension I’ve seen is fully aware of this and is explicit that forcing the issue to the courts is a stalling tactic to buy vulnerable renters more time.) Should it matter, given the unprecedented stakes right now? The specter of homelessness, for those who face it, is literally life-threatening, as the Delta variant surges.

This piece is, I repeat, not about the legality or the politics, so save your comments on that. What I want to write about is the actual prospect of mass evictions and how to understand what it means. There’s a lot of heat and not so much light to be found in the commentary out there right now.

The particular drum I will forever beat here at Strong Towns is that the housing market is not a simple machine: input in, output out. It is a vastly complex system subject to wicked feedback loops as the uncoordinated actions of millions of people—landlords, tenants, sellers, buyers, investors—all affect each other. Mass eviction, both in and out of pandemic times, is best understood as a symptom of a system out of whack.

The eviction ban is a harm reduction policy in response to an emergency situation: the pandemic and the involuntary loss of work and income that many renters faced because of it. Like any blunt-force policy applied at huge scale, its distortions are only going to get worse the longer it is in place. An eviction ban does nothing to address the underlying conditions resulting in unpaid rent, and nothing to help landlords who are themselves in debt—reliant on rent to keep up with maintenance and pay a mortgage whose forbearance will soon expire as well.

A ban on evictions is not a permanent solution to anything about our housing dysfunction. No serious person thinks it’s a permanent option. “What does a permanent solution look like?” is a many times harder question.

But that doesn’t mean the exit ramp available to us right now is adequate, either. No serious person should think that millions of Americans losing their homes, or living in fear of losing them, is an acceptable outcome.

Here are some points and perspectives to consider:

Eviction was a big deal in America before the pandemic. It will be a big deal after. Eviction is a terrifyingly common feature of our housing system. I say “terrifying” because losing your home can be a traumatic experience whose repercussions last years, and which can lock people into a vicious cycle of the same poverty and instability that led to their eviction in the first place.

A 2015 study estimated that 1 in 7 children born in large American cities in 1998–2000 experienced at least one eviction for nonpayment of rent or mortgage between birth and age 15. Among those born into deep poverty, the figure was 1 in 4. These children are often exposed to bouts of homelessness, forced to move to a new school or otherwise had their lives and education massively disrupted. Eviction is an endemic feature of life in very poor neighborhoods in particular. The same study found that about 1 in 8 Milwaukee renter households was involuntarily displaced from their home in a two-year period. Records of formal eviction proceedings always undercount the actual toll of eviction, since many evictions never make it as far as the court system.

Eviction tends to brand those to whom it has happened with a scarlet “E.” Even if you’re not successfully evicted, many states make it easy to search public records for landlord-tenant disputes, and any history of such a court case can be used as grounds for a landlord to refuse renting to someone. In practice, a huge share of housing units are off limits to those with an eviction proceeding on their record. This makes it harder for them to find good, stable housing and perpetuates the cycle.

Eviction as a mass phenomenon is a symptom of bigger problems. The most obvious way to understand an individual eviction is as a function of the landlord-tenant relationship: I rent you an apartment, you owe me rent. You don’t pay rent, you’ve broken your contract.

Mass or serial evictions as a societal phenomenon, though, are a symptom of bigger problems in the housing market. Scholars including, most prominently, Matthew Desmond (author of 2016’s acclaimed Evicted) have argued that serial eviction is a profitable strategy for a subset of landlords in very poor neighborhoods to, essentially, exploit the desperation of their tenants. A landlord can maintain a revolving door of low-income tenants, evict those who fall behind on rent, and keep the security deposit.

This is an option because of certain conditions which are not inevitable. Property tax policies reduce the carrying cost of sitting on a low-quality, low-value home, making “slumlord” or “milker” behavior viable. State laws provide little recourse to tenants facing eviction in the form of a grace period or legal defense. And the housing market effectively does not serve the poorest Americans. According to the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, for every 100 extremely low-income renter households, only 37 homes affordable to those households exist.

The options that used to serve the very low income, such as boarding houses and single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotels, today are illegal almost everywhere; even mobile homes are greatly restricted. Over the past 40 or so years, the market has almost entirely stopped producing new “starter homes”—the size, and cost, of a newly built home has crept up and up and up, leaving those who can’t afford one fighting over a dwindling supply of “naturally occurring affordable housing.”

The lack of options available to the poor creates the situation in which landlords can readily evict a tenant struggling to make rent, keep the security deposit and know another equally poor tenant will be just around the corner.

A colossal number of Americans owe back rent due to the pandemic. We are not in a normal situation. Even in places where COVID restrictions have expired, businesses have reopened, and employment is strong, the number of Americans who owe back rent because of earlier unemployment—most often during 2020’s lockdowns and social distancing restrictions—is utterly unprecedented. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that 11.4 million adult renters, or 16%, are not caught up on rent. For Black renters, that figure rises to 24%.

Read Part Two…