40M Americans Could Lose Homes In Coronavirus Eviction Crisis

ACROSS AMERICA — For nearly three months, 29-year-old Houston mom Kenia Madrigal stared down real fear as she tucked her four children in for the evening in a small SUV that had become the family’s home.

How could she possibly keep them safe from the coronavirus, which hurtled them into crisis when she lost first her job and then the mobile home she had been renting for two years? How could she keep them safe from unseen dangers the nighttime brings? How could she shield them from the emotional wounds homelessness inflicts?

As coronavirus eviction moratoriums and other protections expire, a substantial number of the 100,800,000 Americans living in rental households could be caught in a catastrophic housing crisis, forced into the same hard choices Madrigal made when she moved her family and many of their belongings into her SUV.

A new report from the bipartisan, nonprofit Aspen Institute says that as various state and federal protections end, anywhere from 30 million to 40 million Americans could be evicted from rental housing by the end of 2020.

No state will be untouched, the report warns, and people of color are vulnerable to eviction at much higher rates than white Americans — a confounding systemic issue whose reckoning has come.

Multiple other studies have looked at the effect of coronavirus-related job losses on renters’ ability to pay. They all come to the same dire conclusion: Without government help, millions of renters could be forced from their homes by year’s end.

The Aspen Institute’s deep dive into the burgeoning crisis shows that before the pandemic, one in four Americans were already spending 70 percent of their monthly income on rent.

“I felt very lonely and scared,” Madrigal says of the days and nights her family spent living in their SUV. “You have to go day by day. You never know what the next night will bring, or the next day. When the weather is 100, where can I take them?”

Before the pandemic, Madrigal was among four in 10 Americans living paycheck to paycheck. They were among the most affected as the economy shed 22.2 million jobs when businesses were shuttered under stay-at-home orders.

Their bills didn’t end.

They still haven’t.

“I still have a car payment and gas, and the money comes and goes real quick,” she says. “I was getting child support from my kids’ dad, but he isn’t working and is going to court for murder, and I don’t want him around my children.”

The Aspen Institute estimates anywhere from 2.6 million to 3.8 million Texans — 31 percent to 48 percent of the state’s population — could be kicked out of their homes because they can’t pay the rent.

Evictions of renters could exceed 40 percent in 28 states. More than 50 percent of renters could be evicted in Illinois, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. In Mississippi and Louisiana, eviction rates could be as high as 58 percent and 56 percent of renters, respectively.

Madrigal is among a fortunate very few.

She says that thanks to the charity of strangers, she’ll be able to provide her kids “a safe home, something they know can never be taken from them,” and set up virtual classrooms. A co-worker at Madrigal’s new job making salads for a restaurant chain put together a GoFundMe campaign that so far has raised more than $72,000.

Some 1,300 miles northeast of Madrigal’s new beginning in Houston sits Detroit. There, entire neighborhoods teeter on the precipice of yet another housing and mortgage crisis, says Rachael Baker, an organizer with the activist group Detroit Renter City.

Dominoes Are Falling

Detroit, among the hardest hit by the Great Recession and plunged into a historic bankruptcy, is still reeling from the 2008-09 financial crisis.

The struggles of Detroiters are emblematic of renters in cities across the country, where community housing is a carefully assembled row of dominoes.

One falls, and other services follow in waves, according to housing advocates who say there’s little doubt the eviction crisis will push more people into homelessness. An ongoing University of Michigan study that found more than four in 10 Detroit workers were jobless at the end of June paints a bleak picture of life and death during the coronavirus crisis.

Among the other findings:

• Nearly half of out-of-work Detroiters have children under 18 living in their households, and they reported paying more for food and buying more of it to make up for meals their kids lost access to under school programs.
• More than a quarter aren’t able to pay their rent; nearly half are skipping car, student loan and other payments; and more than half of unemployed workers didn’t expect to be called back to their jobs anytime soon.
• About 44 percent of those out of work expect to be evicted, have their utilities shut off or file for bankruptcy protections against creditors.
• Nearly half of Black Detroiters — who make up about 80 percent of the city’s population — and one-third of Latino Detroiters said they lost their jobs due to the pandemic, compared with just over one-fifth of white Detroiters.

‘A Matter Of Life And Death’

Although business activity is up, especially in the downtown area, poverty and other systemic issues continue to hold Detroit back, Detroit Free Press business journalist John Gallagher wrote late last year in an analysis of the city’s recovery.

This time around, coupled with the public health crisis, “eviction is a matter of life and death,” Baker says, punching out every word of her urgent warning with a passion for Detroiters who can’t seem to catch a break.

“It’s more of a priority for people to pay their rent than to stay alive,” laments Baker, who says the Trump administration and Congress have done an “outstandingly terrible job” in their response to the looming eviction crisis.

“Eviction is a life-or-death scenario,” she says, repeating her dire prediction of widespread homelessness without federal action. “It’s not just inconvenience when there’s a pandemic going on.”

Before the pandemic, more than 36 percent of Detroiters lived in poverty. The pre-pandemic unemployment rate was 9.8 percent, compared with the national average of 3.8 percent.

Baker says Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing nearly double-digit unemployment gives a rosy assessment compared to the real-life situation on the ground. Those statistics are based on people who are actively seeking work, and many have given up, she says.

The University of Michigan and The Aspen Institute studies both conclude the feared evictions will hit minority populations harder than white Americans.

Nationally, 61 percent of Hispanic Americans and 44 percent of Black Americans said they or someone in their household had lost their job when the first wave of unemployment hit in April.

Also at risk for homelessness, according to the report, are people living with disabilities, who historically have a hard time finding a job; LGBTQ people, who experience homelessness at a rate disproportionate to the general population; and undocumented immigrants, who don’t qualify for unemployment pay and didn’t receive a stimulus check.

Courts Dockets Are Full

Baker is steeling herself for a brutal fall.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s eviction moratorium expired in mid-July, but Detroit city officials gave renters a reprieve until mid-August.

That has expired now, too.

Courts are seeing a crush of eviction hearings, but coronavirus restrictions are making it nearly impossible in some cases for tenants to stand up and be heard by a judge.

That’s one of the Catch-22 situations at play in Michigan and other states. Courts aren’t entirely unsympathetic to low-wage Detroiters unable to keep up on their rent payments after they lost their jobs to the pandemic, but they have to show up in 36th District Court, which still isn’t holding in-person hearings, Baker says.

“Tenants are expected to attend over the phone and internet, when for months and months, people have been living on less and have had to make decisions about keeping their phones and internet,” she says. “Until the court opens up again, hearings are likely inaccessible.”

Baker doesn’t think judges will grant wholesale forgiveness of rent in arrears, in part because landlords are still reeling under the Great Recession.

At the least, though, she hopes judges will expunge eviction court proceedings from tenants’ records — a gesture that could put them over one of the hurdles to finding housing.

Madrigal knows how hard it is for people with a court strike against them to find housing, even once they’re back at work. Even when she found a new job in Houston, her eviction court papers followed her, making her quest for housing difficult. She and her family camped out in the car until a friend offered a temporary roof over their heads.

“Coming up with first and last month’s rent and a security deposit isn’t easy,” Madrigal says. “You have to have the money, they run a background check and have to see that you can pay the rent.”

One of the protections still in place in Michigan is an eviction diversion program available to landlords giving them the flexibility to forgive late fees and up to 10 percent of rent in arrears.

Baker expects the $50 million pot of money “to run out quickly,” and says it's only a pittance of the $2 billion the Michigan National Low Income Tenants Association estimates is needed to bail out the lowest-income tenants in the state.

'Horrific Potential For Homelessness'

In Detroit, shelters are already full.

Some evicted tenants will likely end up on the streets. Others may move in with relatives living in federally subsidized housing. That not only increases the risk of the spread of the coronavirus to vulnerable populations, but also puts those folks on the opposite side of rules that limit occupancy.

Those are among the issues that keep Ted Phillips awake at night.

For more than three decades, his job as the executive director of the United Community Housing Coalition is to keep Detroit area residents in their homes and off the streets.

He wakes up at 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock and 4 o’clock in the morning. Like Baker, he’s not sure at all that advocacy efforts will be enough to halt some 31,000 eviction cases currently before the 36th District Court in Detroit.

In normal years, about a third of those cases would end with county deputies rolling dumpsters to the curb as tenants are forcibly removed from their homes.

This year, Phillips says, it’s anyone’s guess how many people the converging health and economic crises will make homeless.

“It’s terrible at any time,” Phillips says. “There’s still massive poverty, there was still large unemployment even before everything hit. There’s horrific potential for homelessness, and a lot of people are trying every day to make it not happen. And the reality is, we had a horrible problem with decent and affordable low-income housing before the pandemic.”

The agency Phillips heads is staffed to provide lawyers for people faced with losing their homes, but finding those people is another matter in the time of the coronavirus.

“One hundred and five of them don’t have phone numbers. The mail is moving so slow it’s difficult. Door-to-door knocking isn’t the safest. Some community folks are knocking on doors and doing a little, but we’re not even at the point that we can have clients in our office,” he says. “There’s a whole rack of issues.”

Landlords Are Hurting, Too

The looming crisis isn’t just a threat to renters. Evictions hurt landlords, too.

Property owners who lack the credit or financial ability to make rent payments in arrears could default on their mortgages, fall short on their property tax payments and let their properties fall into disrepair — disrupting the affordable housing market, destabilizing communities across the United States and potentially triggering another mortgage crisis.

But doing nothing and allowing tenants to fall into homelessness can’t be the answer, say tenants rights groups holding demonstrations across the country. At least 30 states offer no eviction protection for tenants, and federal protections expired last month.

The two major political parties are far apart on emergency relief for Americans thrown into economic uncertainty and outright catastrophe.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky sent senators home for the summer recess without approving an aid package that would have included housing support for renters. Negotiations have resumed on a new aid package, but it’s unclear if evictions will be even a small part of the talks.

After the Senate adjourned, President Donald Trump issued a series of executive orders that offer some relief to renters and landlords.

Former vice president and 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is critical of both Trump and McConnell, saying Congress should approve the same emergency housing support and other assistance that would be provided in the aftermath of a natural disaster.

Doing so, Biden says, puts the country “in a much stronger position to handle the strain the virus is putting on millions of Americans and our entire economy.”

‘People Need To Be Heard’

Baker of Detroit Renter City says a piecemeal approach to the looming crisis by individual states isn’t the answer.

“I look at this as an enormous lost opportunity to make sure that people aren’t suffering,” she says. “To be honest, I think there is some intentionality around it to specifically punish people who are poor and to prioritize property ownership. If you are a homeowner with a federally or bank-backed mortgage, you’re able to negotiate. But tenants are expected to come up with three or four months worth of rent.”

Baker sees an opportunity to mete housing justice in the very policies she sees as punitive to the people she and other housing activists rally behind.

“There’s no solution except to make sure people aren’t evicted and thrown into homelessness when there are no jobs for them to go to,” she says. “Some form of rent forgiveness the landlords, not the tenants, can apply for would be a good path forward.”

Baker acknowledges the holistic approach she advocates is expensive, but insists money can be found in the Pentagon, Homeland Security and other budgets steeling the country against outside threats.

“The mortgages have to be forgiven so the rent can be forgiven for the sake of keeping people in their homes for the sake of avoiding a massive rental and mortgage crisis,” she says.

“There absolutely needs to be more funds to put into help people cover their rent,” says Phillips of Detroit’s United Community Housing Coalition.

He also favors a multi-pronged approach that helps landlords owed rent pay their mortgages while prioritizing tenants just barely getting by — “very often seniors without a long work history, moms with kids who have timed out of public assistance and can quickly find themselves a few thousand dollars in debt with no income coming in,” he says.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development, which administers subsidized housing programs, should also be part of the solution, Phillips says.

“We need to do all of that, in addition to just doing things to get this damned thing under control so we can go back to being normal,” Phillips says.

In Houston, Kenia Madrigal still can’t quite believe the “kindness, support and love of complete strangers” that opened a portal for her family to bounce back from homelessness. She also knows crowdfunding campaigns alone can’t solve the eviction crisis.

“People need to be heard,” Madrigal says. “People need help. As they’re going through this, whether they have children or not, especially in a pandemic, the president and the government need to hear them and not throw them out in the streets.”