As the federal eviction moratorium by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is set to expire July 30, housing groups are focused on getting assistance to renters with financial hardships.
“We are in a much different place than we were a year ago or even several months ago. There was this huge infusion of COVID relief that really has been supporting our residents,” says Paula Cino, vice president of construction, development, and land use policy at the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC), an advocacy group for the apartment industry. “Now is the time to transition from that moratorium period and really focus on getting rental assistance out to those residents who still need it.”
While the NMHC has raised concerns regarding the eviction moratorium and called for getting more support directly into the hands of the renters, the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), an advocacy group dedicated to ensuring people with the lowest incomes in the U.S. have affordable and decent homes, has called for extending and strengthening the federal eviction moratorium until localities can distribute more emergency rental assistance and vaccination rates in marginalized communities have increased.
There are 6.5 million households behind on their rent according to the Census Pulse Survey, says Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy at the NLIHC, adding that approximately 80% of that group are in areas where the new Delta variant of COVID is surging.
“We’re obviously concerned about the public health impacts of the moratorium ending,” Saadian says.
NLIHC leaders and other advocates stress that low-income families have been doing all they can to pay rent during the pandemic, including taking out loans and cutting back on food and other necessities.
After the most recent moratorium extension, officials had said it would be the last time but noted that they would have to look at variants, vaccination rates, and other factors, according to Saadian.
“We think if you’re looking at those factors, they clearly make the case for why you have to have a moratorium,” she adds.
According to Cino, there is a lot of narrative around the idea that a tsunami of evictions is waiting to happen. But she says NMHC data doesn’t support that.
“What our data shows is that rent payments declined only a few percentage points below normal even during the height of the crisis, and that was due to very successful relief efforts. The combined effect of unemployment benefits, multiple rounds of stimulus, and the latest rent relief, with broadly improving economic conditions overall, has really blunted what we thought could be a real housing crisis,” she says. The NMHC Rent Payment Tracker, which tracks 11.7 million professionally managed apartment units across the U.S., found that 95.6% of full or partial rent payments had been made at the end of June, compared with 95.9% during the same period in 2020 and 96% in 2019.
“Nevertheless, there are certain renters who do face hardships,” Cino says. “This significant expansion of relief is available, and we need to focus on those vulnerable households right now.”
State and local governments are trying to ramp up their programs to get emergency rental assistance out. Some places are doing a good job, but there are still many communities that need to be doing more, Saadian says. Overall, just $3 billion of the $46.5 billion in emergency rental assistance provided by Congress had been spent through June 2021.
Cino agrees that the industry has seen challenges with the rental assistance distribution programs. Things were sluggish through the first part of the year, and she says that was somewhat to be expected since there wasn’t an existing infrastructure for getting this level of rental assistance out the door on a nationwide level. However, she says the NMHC is seeing the distribution of funds going in the right direction.
“What we’ve seen in the late spring and into the summer is that jurisdictions are putting out an increasing amount of their funds. It’s not a little increase, it’s an exponential increase,” she says. “We see programs up and running in all 50 states. But we’re asking jurisdictions to take a good look at their programs, and those not pushing out significant funds need to reexamine the programs and look at what peers and neighbors are doing to better ramp up their distribution.”
The NMHC also has issued a set of principles to its members to transition through this period, including urging apartment firms to work with jurisdictions to break down barriers to getting rent relief out, double-down on their communication efforts with their residents, and offer solutions to help residents avoid evictions.
“We are asking them to go that extra step of exploring what rental assistance options are available in those communities, how to connect residents with those programs, apply on behalf of the residents if that’s allowable, and to continue to work with the jurisdictions that serves their communities,” Cino says.
For the NMHC, the end of the moratorium is “an important catalyst to returning renters back to a predictable payment schedule” and bringing stability back to the industry.
“Property owners along with our renters have been struggling throughout this period. But that stability is critical for providers who have been damaged over the past 16 months by revenue losses, who may be struggling to pay their own mortgages, finance property operations and meet their own financial obligations,” adds Cino. “We do think it’s important to move past this moratorium period and get more to a normalized rental environment, and ultimately that’s what is going to be best for renters and address affordability and availability in the long term.”
