On Saturday the federal moratorium on evictions for those who were behind with their rent due to the COVID-19 pandemic expires definitively.
The Congress is thus working against the clock this Friday to try to extend it, after the White House said that the Supreme Court prevents it from expanding it.
Millions of families could be left homeless if you don't.
[How to benefit from Biden's help to avoid being evicted from your home]
More than six million households in the United States were behind in paying their rent, according to March figures from the Department of Housing.
Many were Latino families.
As of July 5, some 3.6 million people were facing eviction, according to the Census Household Pulse Survey.
"Mass evictions"
One of the ravages of the pandemic has been
the rise in unemployment and how it has put the homes of millions of people at risk.
Fears that the evictions would accelerate the spread of the coronavirus led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to issue a federal moratorium on stopping them in September 2020. It expired and was extended several times. then until one "last time" that ends on July 31, as the White House warned.
"We expect to see mass evictions,
" Anne Kat Alexander, researcher and project director at the Eviction Lab, a research laboratory at Princeton University
,
told Noticias Telemundo.
That means "conservatively,
tens of thousands of cases,
of people who were told to leave their homes, which are activated now at the same time."
Until when does the moratorium on evictions for late payment of rent extend?
June 24, 202100: 37
“It's something that worries us a lot,” said Alexander, whose work focuses on eviction policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, “because we know that even if tenants were able to claim CDC protection, (which sometimes they could not they could), there will be a lot of variation in whether the owners will continue that process or will throw people out on the street ”.
Although the protection ends at the federal level, there are states that do offer some protections, while others offer few or none.
[The Governor of California signs the extension of the moratorium on evictions until September 30]
Some have their own moratoriums, such as in California, where it ends on September 30, in New York and New Jersey on August 31 (depending on income), in Hawaii on August 6, and in Maryland, on August 15, between others.
What worries both the White House and the experts is that the states that offer the least protections are also where the cases are growing the most, such as Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Florida and Texas, according to data from the CDC and Johns University. Hopkins.
These last two states have a significant Latino population (Florida, 26% of the population, Texas 40%, according to Census data) for whom the situation of eviction is usually more common and who many times
do not know their legal rights, or are more vulnerable because they do not know the language or have an irregular migratory situation.
"Florida, Texas and Missouri, three states with the lowest vaccination rates, accounted for
40% of all cases nationwide,
" Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus response coordinator
,
said at a news conference Thursday. last.
“For the second week in a row, one in five cases occurs in Florida.
And within communities, these cases are mainly among unvaccinated people. "
Sandra Cruz, who lost her job due to the coronavirus pandemic, was four months late in paying her rent and fears being evicted, and her daughter Gabriella, in Chelsea, Massachusetts, July 22, 2020.Brian Snyder / Reuters
The end of the moratoriums, gasoline for the fire of the pandemic.
Research this year by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) found that the number of
COVID-19 cases and deaths increased dramatically in states that lifted
eviction
moratoriums
since the beginning of the pandemic.
The study, published this week in the Journal of Epidemiology, found that
coronavirus cases doubled and deaths quintupled
in the four months after the moratoriums expired.
According to a statement from UCLA, during the summer of 2020, there were 433,700 more cases of COVID-19 and 10,700 more deaths in the United States than there would have been if the moratoriums had continued.
In total, in September 2020 there were 6.3 million cases of COVID-19, and about 193,000 people died from the disease, according to the CDC.
[New York passes a bill that will give legal aid to tenants in eviction proceedings]
"The evictions may have accelerated the transmission of COVID-19 by
diminishing people's ability to socially distance themselves,"
said Frederick Zimmerman, professor of health policy and management at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health and lead author, in the statement. of the study.
Alexander, from the Eviction Lab, agrees: "The end of the moratorium has us very concerned about the increase in cases," he said, "the moratoriums were put in place for a reason (to decrease cases) and that reason has not gone away."
Latinos and blacks, the most affected
Alexander points to a recent Eviction Lab study showing that where there are higher rates of eviction there are also lower rates of vaccination.
They used vaccination data from the Arizona Department of Health, the City of Philadelphia, the Indiana Department of Health, the New York City Department of Health, and the Texas Department of Health to build it.
Few Latinos Apply for Rent Aid Despite Eviction Risks
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Latinos and blacks are the most affected, because in the neighborhoods where they live, according to studies, it is precisely
where there are more evictions and fewer vaccinated.
"Black tenants routinely face an increased risk of being evicted, a pattern that has continued throughout the pandemic," says the Eviction Lab study.
“Black and
Latinx people are also much less likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
The racial gap in vaccination is narrowing, but black and Latino people still face challenges in accessing vaccines.
[...] The zip codes with the most evictions in each city tend to be in communities of color, while the majority of neighborhoods [...]
with high vaccination rates and low eviction rates tend to be majority White".
[I have not been able to pay the rent, what can I do now? We answer questions about the end of the moratorium on evictions]
This trend was observed in cities as disparate as New York, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Phoenix, Houston, and Dallas.
But it also varies widely across the country where eviction laws are tougher or favor landlords.
In some places, it is so easy and cheap to start an eviction process against a tenant that
"eviction courts are used by landlords as a system for collecting rent,
even when they do not even want to remove the tenant from the house," he says. Alexander.
Los Angeles sheriff's deputies speak to an apartment manager about a vacant apartment they came to to execute an eviction warrant, as the coronavirus spreads, in Los Angeles, California on January 13, 2021. Nicholson / Reuters
In South Carolina, for example, filing an eviction petition costs just $ 45, and in Baltimore, Maryland, just $ 25.
"This is not the way that cutting system is supposed to be used,"
Alexander explains.
This was how many landlords operated before the pandemic, and now that these eviction orders are reactivated many "will go back to their usual way of operating, ignoring how truly destructive it is to a tenant."
Latino evictions, the tip of the iceberg
The proportion of applications filed against Latino tenants during the pandemic has increased in both cities with large Latino populations, such as Houston and Fort Worth, Texas, and small ones, such as Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio, according to data from the Eviction Lab.
In Cleveland, 6% of tenants are Latino, but Latino tenants received 13% of all eviction requests between 2012 and 2016. As of March 15, 15% of the requests have been against Latinos.
But the problem for Latinos may be even greater than is known.
The data that exist are from formal eviction petitions that are filed in the courts, but
there are several times the number of informal evictions,
which varies greatly depending on the area.
Alexander explains that according to a study they conducted in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
for every formal eviction there were two informal ones.
“If that is true in the rest of the country, there are going to be a huge number of invisible evictions.
The logical conclusion is that for Latinos the number is even higher ”.
This may be because they tend not to want to go through the court system, because of the language or their immigration status.
"It may be because they don't want it on their public record, they don't want their next landlord to see it," Alexander explained.
"The person may not want to fight it because they do not have the resources to go through the process, even when they have papers," he added.
There is confusion among undocumented parents about how to receive child checks.
This is what to do
July 16, 202101: 35
There is rent assistance, but it does not reach those who need it
Congress allocated about
$ 47 billion in aid
, which was to go to tenants with late rent payments.
It is federal money that in some cases is given to the states, or to the counties, or to the cities for each to distribute to the tenants who request it.
But as of June, states and local governments had only distributed about $ 3 billion out of the first $ 25 billion tranche.
Some states like New York have given out practically nothing, while several have only approved a few million dollars.
To learn more about how to access these aids, learn more about the eviction process, how to get an attorney to help you defend yourself in eviction court, check out our guide to questions, answers, and tools.
