Eviction disaster looming - Ideas on what to do?

[haele]

I suspect FEMA might need to be activated to provide temporary housing, as HUD has never (to my knowledge) ever had to deal with a massive housing emergency as the moratorium expires and there's a huge amount of rental assistance not spent or disbursed for a variety of reasons - from states and localities unable or unwilling to make an effort to disburse funds, to eviction so as to raise rents or renters taking advantage of the moratorium to squat until they get kicked out.
This isn't the same as the efforts to reduce homelessness. This is a situation where there is a clear underlying cause, and it will immediately affect hundreds of thousands, if not over a million, Americans, and quickly, just as any natural disaster hitting a major city.

We all know the GQP is just salivating to bring up "Bidenvilles" at the mid-terms. Is there any group working on this immediate issue?

Haele

[applegrove]

1. People are going to double up and change dinning rooms into bedrooms.

Last edited Sat Jul 31, 2021, 10:09 PM - Edit history (1)

Lots of people will be forced to move as they cannot afford to pay back rent but could pay current. So their landlords are not going to let them off the hook. They will have bad references. It is going to be hell as the system buckles and social workers will be placing single mothers in known hellholes and the sleazy owners will make them sign year leases. People will die by suicide. People will get sick with covid. They will lose their belongings or have them stolen. Children will be traumatized. Pets will be abandoned. It is going to be hell.

[Hugin]

21. I can't tell you how many relatives I visited growing up who lived in large homes converted to...

multi-family dwellings during the Depression in the Midwest. It seemed like all of them.

I don't know if any had previously been mansions, but, they all had a central stair/hallway. Pretty much the pattern was two 'apartments' upstairs and two on the lower floor with a shared bathroom and kitchen area in the back. Which was where the kitchen was typically located in those houses.

One of my great-aunties thought she had it good, because, she was occupying the former parlor and living room area on the ground floor. Which was basically one large room with an opening in the middle where the doors had been removed.

I only had one great-uncle who lived in the stereotypical 'flop house' long term hotel for the remainder of his life.

Of course, most of this is totally unnecessary and resulted from the Republicans and Trump cronies stealing and misusing the PPP.

[jmbar2]

2. The National Low Income Housing Coalition is very active on the issue

http://nlihc.org/

They have weekly online sessions of advocates and various parties to work on solutions.

[bamagal62]

3. I'm not sure if this has anything

To do with this post. But, this afternoon I got an alert with a link here in Illinois that if you were in danger of being evicted to go to the gov website. I’m hoping it means Illinois is prepared to help.

[womanofthehills]

4. AOC says no evictions until tied up funds get to people

Link to tweet

?s=21

[captain queeg]

5. Some states are delaying the evictions or trying some other tactics

But I read over 7 million people are behind on rent. Don’t know about mortgages. If the evictions really start happening (immediately or in 30 days) there’s going to be a lot of doubled up households, people living in their cars, or just homeless. Then a lot of them will have a blotch on the credit report or references and have trouble renting again.

[cinematicdiversions]

9. Mortgages are not really an issue as there are very few underwater properties around.

As for renters this might help curb the runaway housing prices pain the lower end. A lot of landlords that were forbidden from selling thier properties will be able to do so creating much needed inventory for first time home buyers.

[babylonsister]

6. Dems tried; rethugs shot it down...

Congress fails to extend eviction moratorium, despite last-minute effort
Chelsey Cox
Ella Lee
USA TODAY

The House's rushed effort to extend the moratorium came after the Biden Administration said Thursday that Congress should make the extension.
By the end of March, 6.4 million American households were behind on their rent, according to HUD.

WASHINGTON — After scrambling for votes all day, the House of Representatives on Friday failed to pass a bill that would have extended a freeze on evictions that is slated to expire Saturday.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Whip James Clyburn released a joint statement on the failed bill and blamed Republicans.

"It is extremely disappointing that House and Senate Republicans have refused to work with us on this issue," they wrote in the statement. "We strongly urge them to reconsider their opposition to helping millions of Americans and instead join with us to help renters and landlords hit hardest by the pandemic and prevent a nationwide eviction crisis."

more...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/07/30/congress-wont-extend-eviction-moratorium/5423140001/

[Amishman]

7. The moratorium needs to end eventually, this seems like a good time

Labor markets are healthy and workers have the advantage right now, seems like a good time to end the program.

Land lords did not receive the support they needed to offset the impacts of this policy, extending it further could have other negative impacts on housing availability as landlords decide to sell the property instead (especially given current real estate prices).

[cinematicdiversions]

10. The longer it goes on the worse the pain when it ends.

You see this all the time and we knew that the rent freeze would distort real estate markets and ironically hurt the most venerable and financially illiterate.

[DBoon]

8. We could do what Communist organizers did during the 1930s

https://isreview.org/issue/81/fighting-evictions-during-great-depression

THE GREAT Rent Strike War of 1932 began in a quiet section of the Bronx just east of Bronx Park and west of the White Plains Road elevated line. A neighborhood of modern elevator buildings with spacious rooms, adjacent to a park, the zoo, and the botanical gardens, it seemed an unlikely place for a communal uprising. But by an accident of geography and sociology, this neighborhood contained one of the largest concentrations of communists in New York City.

On the corner of Bronx Park East and Allerton Avenue stood the “Co-ops”—two buildings populated entirely by communists who had moved to the neighborhood as part of a cooperative housing experiment and had remained when the buildings reverted to private ownership. Filled with people for whom “activism was a way of life,” it was a formidable presence in the community. The Co-ops were “a little corner of socialism right in New York,” one activist recalled, “it had its own educational events, clubs for men and women, lectures, motion pictures.” But the rest of the neighborhood’s population, while not so militantly radical, came from comparable backgrounds to the Co-ops people. The majority were Eastern European Jews, skilled workers, and small businessmen who had accumulated enough income to move out of the [Lower] East Side and the South Bronx, but were hardly secure in their middle-class status. More important, many of them grew up in environments in which socialism and trade unionism provided models of heroism and moral conduct, and more than a few had extensive activist backgrounds, whether in bitter garment strikes in New York City or clandestine revolutionary struggle in Europe. Although relatively “privileged” compared to many New York workers (“Certain comrades…wanted to ridicule the movement,” one rent strike organizer wrote apologetically, “not realizing that these ‘better paid workers’ are members of the American Federation of Labor, many of them working in basic industries”), they suffered serious losses of income and employment and were not about to sink quietly into poverty and despair in response to the “invisible hand” of the market. When Unemployed Council activists began to organize them into tenant committees, they responded in a manner that perplexed and enraged landlords and city officials.1

In early January of 1932, the Upper Bronx Unemployed Council unveiled rent strikes at three large apartment buildings in Bronx Park East—1890 Unionport Road, 2302 Olinville Avenue, and 665 Allerton Avenue. In each of these buildings, the majority of the tenants agreed to withhold their rent and began picketing their buildings to demand 15 percent reductions in rent, an end to evictions, repairs in apartments, and recognition of the tenants’ committee as an official bargaining agent. In all three instances, landlords, moving quickly to dispossess leaders of the strike, argued that the demands were extortionate; judges readily granted them notices of eviction.2

But the first set of attempted evictions, at 2302 Olinville Avenue, set off a “rent riot” in which over four thousand people participated. As the city marshals and the police moved into position to evict seventeen tenants, a huge crowd, composed largely of residents of the Co-ops, gathered in a vacant lot next to the building to support the strikers, who were poised to resist from windows and the roof. When the marshals moved into the building and the first stick of furniture appeared on the street, the crowd charged the police and began pummeling them with fists, stones, and sticks, while the “non-combatants urged the belligerents to greater fury with anathemas for capitalism, the police and landlords.” The outnumbered police barely held their lines until reinforcements arrived. As the police once again moved to disperse the crowd, the strikers agreed to a compromise offer that called for two- to three-dollar reductions for each apartment and the return of evicted families to their apartments. “When news of the settlement reached the crowd,” the Bronx Home News reported, “they promptly began chanting the Internationale and waving copies of the Daily Worker as though they were banners of triumph.”

[brooklynite]

11. I have every confidence you won't see FEMA step in...

FEMA deals with short term disaster housing. The economic and housing rental consequences of COVID will be left to the States and cities.

[haele]

12. Not quite what I was asking. We are going to have as much of a problem as if Cascadia fault let go.

What is going to happen when 1 million households are immediately evicted, and up to 6 million more will possibly be evicted in the next 3 months.

We know this will happen. And there are legitimate policies being discussed out there for our current level of homelessness and affordable housing issues. And I have little hope that the banks, or the VA, or HUD will be able to deal fairly with what is going to happen. Remember that at least 1/3 of this country would have no problems stepping over the bodies of the other 2/3rds.

So, better question - Has anyone looked or modeled solutions to mass, sudden homelessness? This is something that should have been considered when an eviction moratorium was announced. Landlords are being hurt, tenets will have a hard time catching up, and vulture investment companies are snapping up distressed properties right and left, taking more housing including rentals - out of reach to the average worker and their families. This is what is happening now.

What is the plan for the next four months? BlackRock is not going to open up all their new properties to low income housing, there aren't enough Section 8 housing available, not enough sofas to crash on, and not enough safe parking areas for people to live out of their cars in.

So what?
FEMA trailers and emergency housing for COVID evictions?
Credit to include storage of goods until housing could be found?
Some sort of process to repair or remove bad credit due to COVID related foreclosures and evictions?
Future legislation requiring that investment property/development conglomerates need to subsidize x amount of affordable housing for each high-end unit they rent or sell?
Government subsidies to repurpose vacant commercial properties to multi-unit housing on an emergency basis?

I'm lucky, but a lot of people I know aren't. Not to mention the slow building homeless/houseless problems we were having before this tsunami hits us.

Haele

[brooklynite]

15. The fact that the moratorium is lifted doesn't mean everyone in arrears will be immediately evicted.

[Sneederbunk]

13. Some may have to consider going back to work.

[rhodytowny]

20. You have any idea how many hours it takes

To earn first, last and security on minimum wage? 20 weeks at 40 hours might get you there, if you save 100% of your net pay and don't spend a dime.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

14. I wonder how many landlords are going to be foreclosed on

because their tenants haven't been paying rent for a year or more.

[roamer65]

16. The used RV market will get red hot soon.

A lot of people are going to live out of their cars, SUV’s and buy used RV’s.

[Johnny2X2X]

17. Evictions take time.

I doubt anyone is out on the street this week.

[MiniMe]

18. They do, but I would assume that the paperwork has been ready to go for quite a while

So the timeline will be quicker

[Johnny2X2X]

19. Eviction is a process

And the courts have to be involved. So the paperwork still has to go to a judge and then there are court dates and waiting periods depending on the state.

And sorry, but 16 months with no evictions is not OK for landlords.