We don’t know enough to help.

We don’t know how many people have received eviction notices since the moratorium expired over the weekend.

We will never know how many people were informally evicted — people who left their homes quickly out of fear of being asked to pay what they do not have, or people who faced lock-outs or intimidation from their landlords.

We don’t even really know how many renters were actually at risk of eviction or which landlords are on the brink of financial ruin over the last year.

Congress set aside roughly $45 billion to make sure that a pandemic that wreaked havoc on the livelihoods of millions wouldn’t force families out of their homes through no fault of their own. This was no band-aid or short-term measure. Experts, renters’ advocates, even landlords agreed: This was the solution. Money itemized explicitly for the purpose of helping people make rent. More than half of it was allocated under the Trump administration and the rest under President Joe Biden.

And yet, as of the end of June, the most recent data the Treasury Department has made available shows only around 6.5 percent of that money has gone out the door. It’s not for lack of trying. But we have allowed low-income tenants to exist at the peripheries of society and of our safety nets, to the point that reaching them, even when there is aid available, becomes a massive, expensive, and often impossible undertaking.

“One of the things that this pandemic has made very clear is that there’s a lot that we don’t know about our housing market,” Vincent Reina, director of the Housing Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania, told me in May. “The vast majority of cities don’t have full registries of every owner in their city. ... It shows we often don’t know who owns properties and what’s going on with these properties or which tenants are experiencing financial hardship.”

When Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond published his book Evicted in 2016, it was a shocking portrayal of how the government has failed very low-income renters. He launched the Eviction Lab two years later to create the first-ever national database of evictions in America, writing: