Next pandemic threat to economy: A wave of evictions

Government aid for individuals during the pandemic was speedy but also limited in its duration. The expiration of eviction bans is a test of whether the U.S. will let a health crisis also become a housing crisis.

The first of the month had come and gone, and now in early July the man with the clipboard arrived at the apartments on North Hopkins Street, a plain two-story brick building where grass and weeds grow scraggly along the street and broken furniture lies abandoned around the dumpster out back.

To tenants he was a figure of doom. On the second floor, he stuck a folded eviction notice in the door of Apartment 14, two units down from where Sorea Appling lived. It wasn’t long before Apartment 14’s tenant, and the woman in Apartment 5 downstairs, had found new places to live.

“They say once you get your door knocked on by the man with the clipboard, you might as well leave,” says Ms. Appling, a public school janitor who has been out of work since March and worries that she might be next.

Her worries are increasingly shared by renters across the nation. For several months during the coronavirus pandemic a combination of tenant grit, landlord forbearance, and federal aid has helped people stay in their homes. State or local bans on evictions have in many cases offered a reprieve.

Now those eviction bans are phasing out along with key government support for unemployed workers. With the economy far from recovered, some of the steepest declines in income have been faced by low-income renters like Ms. Appling. By some estimates, the United States could see more than 11 million households evicted in the next four months.

“People are going to go over a cliff,” says Mary Cunningham, a housing expert at the nonprofit Urban Institute, and co-author of a new analysis on the problem. “We’ve seen this coming. We’ve been racing toward it with the clock running out and, so far, Congress hasn’t responded.”