The crisis that wasn't: eviction moratorium sunsets, the world continues
Local media quivered in fear at the end of the nation's eviction moratorium. The moratorium was launched during the height of the pandemic, and greatly constrained landlords' abilities to demand payment by renters. As it turns out, the moratorium ended, and....crickets. National Review explores.
"When the Supreme Court decided to strike down a federal ban on evictions in August, lawmakers and housing experts mentioned a slew of devastating metaphors — cliff, tsunami, tidal wave — to describe the national eviction crisis they saw coming. One month later, however, many of those same authorities find themselves wondering: Where is the cliff?" --Washington Post
Where, indeed? Lawmakers didn’t merely use strong figures of speech. One of them camped out on the steps of the Capitol to share in the plight of the soon-to-be-evicted. That lawmaker, Cori Bush of Missouri, used the E-word to describe the problem, “We have an eviction emergency, and so that has to be the focus, making sure people are not forced out of their homes right now.”
The eviction moratorium has been over for a month now, and it looks like there was no emergency after all. That’s not to say some people aren’t having a hard time paying rent. But there are always some people having a hard time paying rent, pandemic or not, and that is not an emergency in demand of an unconstitutional and destructive policy.
“Housing and eviction experts offered a mix of guesses about why an expected onslaught of evictions has not yet materialized, including that the wave could still be coming,” the Post reports. They don’t seem to have considered that they may have been caught up in a political frenzy about an emergency that didn’t exist.
The Post quotes one housing expert who said that, “This may not take the form of a sudden spike in eviction cases all at once. It may be something that’s much more delayed and diffuse.” We were told to expect a sudden spike, though, if the eviction moratorium was lifted. We were told that not extending the moratorium was arbitrary and cruel. We were told the mass wave of homelessness would spread COVID.
It hasn’t happened, and in the Atlanta region, the Post reports, eviction filings are actually down.
There’s no such thing as good news to American progressives. Millions of people haven’t been evicted, contrary to their own expectations. That’s terrific! There simply is no looming eviction emergency that demands extralegal action from the federal government. There are already a zillion different ways — public and private, state, local, and federal — that people can get assistance when they fall on hard times. On top of that, Congress has authorized $46.5 billion in rental assistance for the pandemic. And the United States overall, since the beginning of the pandemic, has provided more relief to its citizens than almost any other country, providing over $60,000 in relief to many families.
It’s time to retire the talking points about eviction and realize that there’s no emergency. The moratorium wasn’t necessary. Ending it wasn’t cruel, and there’s no reason to bring it back.
Read the whole thing here.
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