Although the pandemic rescue package finally signed by a pouting Donald Trump last night extends the federal moratorium on evicting renters who cannot make their payments, it’s only a temporary reprieve. The House and Senate-passed bill extends the eviction moratorium by only one month. We're right back here in February, albeit with a new president not permanently sidelined by his own narcissistic delusions.
And the underlying problem is not going away. After the bungling incompetence of government responses from March onward, we are in a new pandemic surge. One in every thousand Americans has died from the virus. Without more lockdowns, the death toll will double in coming months; vaccines simply cannot be manufactured and distributed fast enough to prevent it. And all that means that those who have lost their jobs in a shattered pandemic economy cannot pay rent, and haven't been able to pay rent, and will not be able to pay months of backlogged rent with a new $600 check, or a $2,000 one. $600 will go to food first, medicine second, rent third.
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The Washington Post reports that over 11 million American households are or are about to be delinquent on rent payments, and that the "backlog" of overdue rent is now estimated at about $70 billion. The end of federal eviction moratoriums will unleash an expected flood of evictions; that, during the dead of winter, will result in mass homelessness. Landlords themselves cannot absorb losses on this scale, and many properties will end up in foreclosure. It is all a giant mess, and the $25 billion in rental assistance in the newly signed bill will only sweep up a small part of it.
The only way it wouldn't be a mess is if the nation had embarked on the blindingly obvious and expert-recommended path of tight, short-duration lockdowns in the places the virus first popped up rather than letting it wash through every state and county with a shrug.
There will absolutely, without question, be a homelessness crisis when the moratorium finally expires. It is a given. The moratorium is simply preventing some evictions for the moment—families are still accruing those debts, month by month by month, and there is not a chance in hell most of the newly unemployed will be able to come up with months of back rent on whatever date is finally set. There will be tent cities at this rate.
All that said, though: You know something? Even $70 billion is not that much. Not in the scheme of trillion-dollar stimulus packages. Not when it comes to erasing a mass homelessness crisis with a single emergency program targeting a single emergency. Congress could wipe all the overdue rent and make landlords and tenants whole for the duration of the pandemic, and it would just ... work. Malevolent people would call it socialism, because after decades of demanding that government be pared down so that it is responsible only for national crises, it turns out government is not supposed to respond to the crises, either. Phone calls from the bank lobbyists will probably convince them that helping children not die on winter streets is a mere unfortunate side effect, one that should not dissuade Congress from funneling most of that $70 billion directly into Wall Street coffers. It is for Main Street, after all. Nobody wants the banks to foreclose on everyone all at once.
To repeat the obvious yet again, we are in a worldwide pandemic. It is, quite literally, the worldwide disaster that governments have been fearing and warning of and (allegedly) preparing for over decades. Now that it's here, the discussions are over whether giving one-time payments of $600 will make the lower classes shiftless and lazy, and whether limiting the death toll was really ever a government responsibility to begin with. We are not going to go down in history as a nation of scholars, that’s for certain.
We could just eat the debt, as a nation. Wouldn't be fair to rent-payers, except that the rent-payers would benefit from a non-collapsed economy rather than a collapsed one. Wouldn't be good "policy." But it may be that or tent cities; if there's a third choice, it's not immediately obvious.