Tag: evictions

Millions Of Americans Face Eviction In Coming Months

The economy is fine, so we’re told. There is no recession, so we’re told. The Federal Reserve has everything under control, so we’re told. Meanwhile, 3.8 million Americans say they could face eviction in the next two months.

It doesn’t sound like everything is fine.

The median rent in the US eclipsed $2,000 per month in June for the first time ever. It’s another symptom of rampant inflation burning through the US economy.

While the CPI cooled slightly in July, shelter costs rose another 0.5% month-on-month. On a yearly basis, shelter costs have spiked by 5.7%, according to government numbers. And the CPI drastically understates the cost of housing. Actual rents have increased more than 15% in the last 12 months, according to data compiled by Zillow.

With rents skyrocketing, households representing 8.5 million people are behind on their rent, according to the Census Bureau. Of those, 3.8 million say they are somewhat or very likely to be evicted within the next two months.

According to Yahoo Finance, “The combination of soaring inflation, the end of most eviction moratoriums and rental assistance payments and an extremely low vacancy rate has pushed rents up — and many renters out.”

Nearly half of all renters experienced rent hikes in the past 12 months, according to Census Bureau data. Eleven percent have seen rent increases of over $250 per month.

To make ends meet, people are turning to credit cards and loans, raiding savings, selling assets, and dipping into retirement funds. According to the Census Bureau, 57% of renters said they were forced to resort to one of these desperate measures to keep up with their rent.

This dovetails with the skyrocketing levels of household debt. Americans added another $40.1 billion to their debt load in June alone. That represented a 10.5% year-on-year increase. Credit card balances increased by $46 billion in the second quarter of this year. Over the last year, credit card debt has exploded by 13%, the biggest increase in over 20 years.

According to Yahoo Finance, the Fed’s efforts to stem inflation are adding to the pain. With mortgage rates rising, renters who were hoping to buy homes have been priced out of the market.

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The Left Discovers It Loves Evictions as Florida Landlord Challenges DeSantis by Evicting Unvaccinated Tenants

A major Florida landlord has announced it will evict current tenants who do not have proof of vaccination and will refuse to lease to new tenants who have not vaccinated.

If you’re not vaccinated for COVID-19, you can forget about moving into any of eight apartment complexes in Broward and Miami-Dade counties owned by Santiago A. Alvarez and his family.

And if you’re still unvaccinated when it comes time to renew your lease, you’ll have to find someplace else to live.

Alvarez, who controls 1,200 units in the two counties, is the first large-scale landlord known to national housing experts to impose a vaccine requirement not only for employees, but also for tenants. They’ll be required to produce documentation that they’ve received at least an initial vaccine dose.

The policy, which took effect Aug. 15, could set Alvarez’s company on a collision course with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ vaccine passport ban, which prohibits businesses from requiring that customers be vaccinated.

And yet the landlord might have exposed a loophole in the governor’s ban, forcing courts to decide whether a tenant is equivalent to a customer.

Alvarez says he’s not backing down. Signs posted at the leasing offices of his apartment complexes spell out the policy along with the words “Zero Tolerance.”

“We have to be concerned about our tenants and our employees,” Alvarez said in an interview. “All of these are private properties. We’re just trying to keep people safe and healthy. It’s going to cost us money, but we’re very firm on that.”

There is a lot going on here.

First up, the reaction by the left shows that they are immoral and slavishly devoted to polishing Biden’s shoes or whatever. In August, you’ll recall, the Supreme Court shut down the illegal “eviction moratorium” imposed by the CDC. This, we were told, was Armageddon.

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The Politics of Spectacle: On Eviction Moratorium, The Squad Talks the Walk

Members of Congress departed for a seven-week vacation at the same time that the Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) national eviction moratorium expired on July 31. The Squad, a subset of members of the House of Representatives who espouse Bernie Sanders’ policy agenda, gathered at the Capitol building to demand that Congress come back to work and hold a vote to renew the moratorium. Cori Bush, Jamal Bowman, and other Squad members slept on the Capitol steps overnight as part of the ongoing protest. Critics on social media pointed out that the rally was too little, too late while others remarked that the low attendance of the rally, comprised mainly of political surrogates, rendered the action nothing more than a photo opportunity for the Squad.

Founder of Black Agenda Report (BAR) Glen Ford died three days before the protest. Ford strongly opposed the politics of diversity, which privilege political representation over substantive policy demands and the popular power required to achieve them. He closely monitored the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) to demonstrate that voting for elected officials who look and behave like their constituents does not necessarily equate to representation. Ford led BAR’s effort to expose how the CBC, for example, voted in large majorities to militarize U.S. police departments and enshrine their officers with protected class status under federal hate-crime legislation.

The Squad rose to prominence following Barack Obama’s two-term presidency. Obama represented the pinnacle of diversity. Obama was famously touted as a victory in the long, hard struggle of Black Americans for human rights, yet his administration greatly expanded the theater of the U.S. war machine and enacted a broad policy agenda friendly to the rich. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign emerged from the economic discontent once encapsulated by Occupy Wall Street — a protest movement that Obama’s DHS and FBI brutally repressed at the tail end of his first term. In a pivot away from protest, an increasingly left-leaning Democratic Party base placed their energy into electing “progressive” members of Congress.

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CITIES ARE PRESSURING LANDLORDS TO EVICT PEOPLE UNDER ‘CRIME-FREE’ HOUSING LAWS

Granite City is one of thousands of municipalities across 48 states—from El Cajon, California to nearly 50 towns in the Twin Cities metro area and Appleton, Wisconsin to Norristown, Pennsylvania and beyond—that have enacted similar ordinances, according to the International Crime Free Association, whose founder developed the crime-free model in the early 1990s. 

Sometimes known as nuisance property ordinances, these laws can take slightly different forms but their goals are often the same: to penalize landlords and tenants by encouraging or requiring eviction for contact with the criminal legal system, including suspected criminal activity and calls for police services. These ordinances often encourage or require private landlords to evict tenants as a result. In many places, tenants are often required to sign an addendum to their lease agreement, acknowledging the law and agreeing to its consequences.

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Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People

“SINCE COVID-19 MANY AMERICANS FELL BEHIND IN ALL ASPECTS,” reads the website copy. The button below this statement is not for a GoFundMe, or a petition for calling for rent relief. Instead, it is the following call to action, from a company called Civvl: “Be hired as eviction crew.” 

During a time of great economic and general hardship, Civvl aims to be, essentially, Uber, but for evicting people. Seizing on a pandemic-driven nosedive in employment and huge uptick in number-of-people-who-can’t-pay-their-rent, Civvl aims to make it easy for landlords to hire process servers and eviction agents as gig workers.

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The CDC Is America’s New Landlord

This is astonishing, even by 2020 standards.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, operating under the US Department of Health and Human Services, has asserted jurisdiction over private residential leases nationwide. It intends to curtail evictions until at least the end of the year, and in fact its new directive threatens federal criminal penalties against landlords who ignore tenant “declarations” made using CDC forms.

It is unclear, to put it mildly, exactly how this jurisdiction over private contracts and state/local courts flows even to Congress, much less an administrative agency acting on its own. One federal official justifies the bizarre and legally dubious action based on the CDC’s broad charter to stop the spread of communicable diseases—a charter at which they’ve failed miserably with covid:

Congress has delegated broad authority to HHS, the Surgeon General and CDC, to take reasonable efforts to combat the spread of communicable diseases, and frankly I think it makes sense for those authorities abroad because we don’t know for any given situation or scenario what steps will be needed to stop the spread. I think, in this particular order, the CDC has made a very compelling case that it is quite problematic at this particular time. It’s focused on this particular pandemic, which is obviously the uniquely powerful grasp in the nation’s entire history in terms of the effect it’s had that for a bunch of reasons in particular, that the home has been sort of the focal point of people social distancing and building, sort of a safe space themselves over the past few months, and also the fact that if people get kicked out, they may end up in overcrowded congregated living facilities or homeless shelters, and that is a potential recipe for a big spread of COVID-19.

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Tech Giants Eye Lucrative Rent Market as End to Eviction Moratorium Could Leave Millions Homeless

Parallel to this and largely under the radar, however, the private tech sector is moving into position to swoop in and take advantage of the impending housing crisis. Just as news of a mysterious virus was breaking late last year, Facebook invested $1 billion for the construction of 20,000 new affordable housing units in California, following Google’s lead which had made the exact same commitment a few months earlier. Apple more than doubled Google’s and Facebook’s investment, combined, when it put down $2.5 billion for the same cause.

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Looming evictions may soon make 28 million homeless in U.S., expert says

Emily Benfer began her career representing homeless families in Washington, D.C.

Her first case involved a family that had been evicted after complaining to their landlord about the holes in their roof. One of the times she met with the family, one of the children, a 4-year-old girl, asked her: “Are you really going to help us?” Benfer struggled with how to answer.

“I’d met them too late,” she said. “I couldn’t stop the eviction. They had already been sleeping on the subway, and in other people’s homes. And you could see the effects it was taking on them.”

Today, Benfer is a leading expert on evictions. She is the chair of the American Bar Association’s Task Force Committee on Eviction and co-creator of the COVID-19 Housing Policy Scorecard with the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. Throughout the public health crisis, Benfer has been investigating how states are dealing with evictions and sharing what she finds in a public database. 

CNBC spoke with Benfer about the coming eviction crisis and what can be done to turn it around. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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