The Eviction Crisis and the Many Hands of the State
Within 48 hours of my last post on the phasing out of pandemic relief programs, the Supreme Court issued a 6–3 ruling striking down the CDC’s eviction moratorium. As millions of Americans faced renewed risks from eviction, the story was easily buried on the back pages of major newspapers.
On the one hand, sidelining the decision may just reflect media’s bias against covering changes in the economic realities of low-income Americans. As recent work by the political scientist Alan Jacobs and his colleagues shows, perhaps unsurprisingly, the tone of economic news “strongly and disproportionately tracks the fortunes of the richest households, with little sensitivity to income changes among the non-rich.”
Yet the low salience also likely reflects the fragmented authority over housing policy in this country. When the Supreme Court strikes down an order that will have effects on millions of Americans, the most relevant question is what now? That the answer is not clear reflects the sclerosis of American institutions.
The most immediate answer to “what now?” is the congressional reauthorization of the moratorium. That is, after all, what the Court gave its blessing to (even though Congress already blessed CDC’s discretion to do this on its own in the 2021 Consolidated Appropriations Act — an argument the Court, for all of its textualist pretensions, ignored). House progressives, led by Reps. Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, Jimmy Gomez, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are urging congressional leaders to do more, reinstating the moratorium in a must-pass legislative vehicle. But at the moment — and absent major social mobilization — Congress seems unlikely to act swiftly to reinstate the moratorium. Instead, members of Congress are turning public attention to state and local governments, “urging them to get federal rental assistance into the hands of eligible recipients.”
Congress, whatever its internal dysfunctions, should still be seen as the focal point for action. But the fact that state and local governments have millions of dollars in unspent rental assistance makes it easier for congressional leaders to punt the issue to governors, mayors, and county executives. This fragments and complicates the story, bleeding it of urgency.
It is of course true that state and local governments can do more to ensure that Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) funds are distributed. The National League of Cities has a decent checklist on this, which anyone reporting on local responses to the Court’s decision should look at.
But it is also worth asking how much we should be relying on local governments to swiftly amend and expand their ERA programs when Congress could extend the moratorium, allowing these agencies time to make more meaningful program adaptations. Recall that ERA programs are now in the hands of state and local agencies as well as private contractors that have had little experience in doing rental relief. Unsurprisingly, public awareness of these funds is low. These programs are also studded with needless paperwork requirements, especially in jurisdictions which do not allow individuals to self-certify various eligibility requirements. And of course, landlords can simply decline to participate. In Milwaukee, and Wisconsin more generally, assistance has fallen off in recent months as the charts below show. The bottom line here: it is unreasonable to expect that ERA funds will get out to those who need them in advance of the eviction timeline. And there’s already evidence of this in Mississippi.
It is also tempting to think that, in the absence of congressional action, state and local governments can swiftly enact eviction moratoria of their own. This is hardly universally true. In Wisconsin, where top legislative leaders are landlords themselves, no one is holding their breath for a statewide moratorium. Nor are local moratoria likely, since the legislature preempted these actions back in 2011. The State Supreme Court has also recently declined to act under its own constitutional authority to issue stays on writs of restitution, or to enact a statewide eviction moratorium on its own.
By one estimate, 16,000 Wisconsinites could face eviction now that the CDC moratorium has expired. Assuming Congress does not take swift action to reinstate the moratorium, and neither state nor local governments treat a wave of evictions in the midst of the Delta surge as a crisis, the last line of defense will be overburdened civil-society organizations — the legal aid societies, the eviction defense projects, and the tenants unions. They will need everyone’s help. But the necessity of mutual aid does not relieve Congress of its responsibility. Nor should it convince anyone that the archipelagoes of relief have ever been a sufficient floor over the pit of despair.
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