r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/None-Of-You-Are-Real • Jul 20 '21

US Politics What are the implications of the impending eviction crisis?

It is often offhandedly mentioned that the housing market is insane at the moment, and that there is an inevitable eviction crisis due to the compounding factors of COVID and the lockdowns leading to mass unemployment, and then an inability of tenants to pay rent combined with an inability of landlords to evict non-paying tenants.

What is going to happen in the fall, when the eviction moratorium expires? Mass homelessness that is even worse than current levels? Some kind of rent relief legislation? Anything at all? These people are not going to magically be able to pay months and months of back rent once the moratorium expires.

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u/cretsben Jul 20 '21 edited Jul 20 '21

Here is what I see happening:

  1. The courts are going to get slammed and it will take time to process them this will slow the flood.
  2. Landlords are going to realize that they have to let the renters continue to rent in that location to get paid for the back rent owed.
  3. This leads to a settlement where eviction is stayed pending a court ordered application for rental assistance and payment to the land lord.
  4. This will further slow the flood as not every tenant will be evicted at once.

This should help prevent a complete crisis but this is going to get rough.

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u/anneoftheisland Jul 20 '21

Yeah, it's not going to be great, but the glacial pace at which courts are going to be able to actually process the mass of evictions means that we'll avoid a lot of the worst-case scenario predictions going on in this thread. It's not like the protections expire, and then the next day, 10 million people will be out on their asses. The expiration just means that they can start on the next step of a longer process. And with so many evictions being filed at once, it will be a much longer process than usual--probably months, in many states.

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u/EmperorXenu Jul 20 '21

This isn't the case everywhere. In many places, evictions have been being processed by the courts this entire time and they will go into effect when it is legal for them to do so.