Jun 18

The Guardian has a longer, but interesting article on the end of the CDC moratorium. I recommend reading it

Unpaid rent is a large problem. The article of course looks at this from the renter perspective, but the $50-100B of unpaid rent currently has only impacted owners due to the moratoriums.

In mid-May, 7.49 million US adults said they were not current on rent or mortgage payments and had slight or no confidence they could make next month’s payment, according to the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.

So far, the eviction moratorium has kept many of these families housed. There were 1.55m fewer eviction cases last year than would be filed in a typical year, according to an estimate by the Eviction Lab.

Without the moratorium, they will need access to the $46.55bn in rental assistance allocated by the government to help renters and landlords – though its distribution got off to a slow start.

The Guardian

The federal aid favors rural states, with few renters over urban areas. The taxpayers’ money should be distributed where the need is, not on political lines. This is a point that Heiner and I agree with Peter Hepburn of the Eviction Lab. We all need to urge Congress to fix this.

And Hepburn has found that because of the way the assistance is being allocated, more money will be available in small, rural states than in larger, urban states.

Black and Latino renters, particularly women, are disproportionately at risk of eviction and face more uncertainty as the moratorium expires.

“It was a series of omissions and mistakes that taken jointly result in a really inefficient and inequitable distribution of this money,” Hepburn said. “I don’t know that that was done with any sort of intent to disadvantage communities of color but I think it inevitably does.”

Geographically the evictions crisis will also be unevenly distributed.

In Wyoming, households can collect more than $5,167 in rental aid, while in New York’s expensive renter markets, households will have access to $766, according to his analysis.

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