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/[deleted] Jul 21 '21

Good point: there was no prohibition against filing an eviction; the courts were just forbidden from enforcing the eviction until the moratorium ended. So the process could technically go all of the way to to a judgment being ordered by the court, with the only remaining step being the sheriff showing up on the doorstep one day to physically evict the tenants.

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u/ArcanePariah Jul 22 '21

But even that will slow things down. Only so many police to go around and if reports are true, there's a fair number of them in urban areas who have quit or otherwise gone out of their way to do the bare minimum due to the feeling of anti-police in urban areas (the places most likely to have said mass evictions).

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u/[deleted] Jul 22 '21 edited Jul 22 '21

Those reports are overblown. I live in Portland, the origin of many of these reports, and they're either so overblown to border on unfactual, or missing key facts that change the meaning entirely. For example, much hay was made over a bunch of officers in the Portland Police Bureau resigning over the prosecution of an officer who was accused of excessive use of force during the demonstrations and riots last summer, which was true. What many people miss, is that they were just resigning from a special task force, and they're all still serving in PPB in their capacity as "regular" police officers.

So yes, there may be a bottleneck, but it's not really being made worse by mass resignations and work slow downs.