Letting Go of the Rope in Eviction Court

Originally posted in Housing is a Human Right

“It’s been a lot,” Ashley told the judge in the Indianapolis eviction court where my law students and I represent tenants each week. Fighting back tears, she described how first she and then two of her three kids got sick. Then the car she used to get to her home healthcare jobs broke down. Ashley (I won’t use tenants’ real names here) missed shifts, lost one of her jobs, and fell behind on rent.

As recently as a year and a half ago, Ashley and almost every one of the 71 other people on today’s eviction docket were safely housed. They were making ends meet thanks in large part to some combination of Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act stimulus checks, extended unemployment benefits, expanded child tax credit, and maximized food stamps.

Together with a national eviction moratorium, we extended a lifeline to tens of millions of Americans. The Eviction Lab at Princeton University estimates that these programs prevented more than three million eviction cases

More broadly, we achieved the remarkable result of poverty rates actually dropping during a pandemic. It was the first time that the U.S.’s shared prosperity began to resemble that of other industrialized nations where housing is a human right and subsistence needs like healthcare and childcare are guaranteed.

 Then, one by one, we let all these protections drift away. The extended unemployment benefits ended last September, the expanded child tax credit was not renewed for 2022, in June food stamps reverted to their previous level.

One program remained: Emergency Rental Assistance. In two segments, Congress approved $46 billion in rental assistance to be distributed by cities and states. If renters had endured pandemic-related financial hardship and their incomes were below 80% of their area’s median income, they could get funds delivered directly to their landlords or sometimes to the renters themselves.

For many of our clients, housing takes up nearly all of their monthly income, especially if they live with a disability or have extensive childcare obligations. They are in the unlucky three of every four households whose incomes are low enough that they qualify for a federal housing subsidy such as a voucher or a public housing apartment, only to be shut out due to insufficient supply.

So, it was no surprise that they flocked to the emergency rental assistance program. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University documented that nearly one in four renters with annual incomes below $25,000 applied to the program.

We can attest to those dollars’ impact. For Elise, who has been unable to work much while caring for a sister living with severe disabilities; for Courtney, who shuttles between two fast-food jobs while finding off-hours childcare for her toddler son; for James, who missed several weeks of work after being injured on the job, the rental assistance program kept them housed.

Now it is gone, too.

Many states and cities exhausted their rental assistance allotment several weeks ago. The State of Indiana’s program for smaller and rural communities went dry in July.  The National Low-Income Housing Coalition and other advocates are pushing for the rental assistance program to become permanent, but to no avail so far. Eviction filings are rising to near pre-pandemic levels. 

Indianapolis’ version of emergency rental assistance, called IndyRent, hung on longer than many. But it too ended, just one day before Ashley was summoned to court. When she got there, the sign outside the courtroom with the four-foot blue arrow directing people to Rental Assistance was still up. But it does not point to anything.

Ashley is ordered to move her family out of their home by December 22nd, the same date given to dozens of others in court today. In the hallway after the hearings, we tell them that they likely have a few extra days beyond the official move-out date. Neither landlords nor constables like the optics of putting families out of their homes around Christmas.

But their eviction day is coming. Not so long ago, our country saw the struggles of Ashley and the other families lined up in court today, and we pulled them up to a place of safety and security. Now, finally, we have let go of that rope.

President Biden Can Do Something About High Rents

My second article since the last newsletter issue is “Rents are Too High: President Biden Should Issue an Executive Order Lowering Them,” online at Jacobin.

The piece explains a campaign led by the terrific advocacy group People’s Action, along with hundreds of other organizations and Senator Elizabeth Warren, among others. They are pushing the President to sign an order that would compel rent controls for landlords benefitting from federally-backed mortgages and cities that are seeking federal housing funds. It also calls for launching more investigations into rent-gouging as an unfair trade practice.

Besides the current housing crisis, the rationale for presidential action is that wealthy landlords turn to the federal government to prop up their operations. “The business model of many of these real estate investors is to get government-backed mortgages through Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or a tax credit from the Treasury Department or support from HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development] or the Department of Agriculture,” says Tara Raghuveer, director of People’s Action Home Guarantee campaign. “So we see it as an absolute necessity that the federal government actually use those public subsidies and financing as leverage to increase the power position of the tenant relative to the landlord.”