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Demonstrators in Brooklyn, New York, call for an extension of the state’s eviction ban until 2022 and the cancellation of rent, August 19, 2021.
Now that the epidemiologists over at the Supreme Court have made their decision on optimal anti-infection policy (right before moving to decide optimal family-planning policy, all without an actual hearing of oral arguments), evictions can resume across the country wherever there are no state or local moratoria in place. But if the policy goal is to prevent evictions, there’s a very simple way—in theory—to accomplish it.
The way evictions for nonpayment of rent work almost everywhere is that landlords need to file a lawsuit to remove the tenants from the unit, after serving them a notice to either pay what they owe or leave the property. There are courts set up all over the country to handle these evictions. That means there’s a choke point for the vast majority of evictions in the country.
If you really want to prevent evictions and keep people off the street in the middle of a pandemic that continues to pummel this country, you could institute what I would call the “big bag of money” option. In theory—and again, all of this is theory—you could install a federal official at every eviction court in America, and whenever a case is read, with the amount owed to the landlord stated, the guy can dip into his big bag of money and pay the debt. In nearly all cases, this will satisfy the landlord and put a stop to evictions, which Goldman Sachs estimates will otherwise hit 750,000 families over the next four months.
The important part here is that the big bag of money has already been authorized by Congress on a bipartisan basis. Goldman Sachs estimates that there’s currently anywhere between $12 billion and $17 billion owed to landlords. In two separate laws, Congress has appropriated $46.5 billion in emergency rental assistance. Congress passed the first $25 billion with 92 votes in the Senate and 359 votes in the House, and it was signed by Donald Trump. The second tranche of $21.5 billion was signed into law by Joe Biden.
The latest figures show that about $41.3 billion in rental assistance remains, enough to cover all the rental debt in the United States more than two times over. So the big bag of money would never be exhausted, for the duration of the pandemic. I can hear my conservative friends saying that all tenants upon hearing this news would go on a mass rent strike. You could obviously prevent that by declaring that the big bag of money only goes to those who’ve incurred rental debt before September 1, or some such proviso.
The point is, if you wanted to stop evictions, you could do it, with legally appropriated money. In theory.
In practice, we set up hundreds of brand-new quasi-governmental agencies to distribute application forms. The money was only given to “deserving” folks with rental debt caused by the economic conditions of the pandemic, and the landlords needed to participate in the operation (initially, the money went directly to them, and they had to affirmatively agree to accept it; many did not, because they wanted the tenants out so they could raise rents). When the Treasury Department tried to change the rules, as they have numerous times, they had to contact the hundreds of entities giving out the rental assistance.
This went about as well as you would expect, with a little over 11 percent of the total “emergency” funds distributed in the first seven months. Again, the immediate purpose is to stop evictions as a public-health imperative, not to pick and choose between deserving and undeserving tenants. And all evictions have to go through this one bottleneck of eviction court. If you really wanted to stop them, just go to the eviction court with a big bag of money.
We haven’t done this because of a variety of factors, from our fealty to local control of things like rental markets to the all-consuming fear that someone, somewhere would be getting a good deal. This paralyzes our policy apparatus, and prevents simple solutions. You have liberal Democrats trying to revive the eviction moratorium through legislation, and Republicans rejecting their overtures, and yet there’s a big bag of money available and we know where the eviction decisions are made, and we can’t put these two things together.
If you’ve lived in America for the past 18 months—or 18 years, or more—you probably have seen this pattern repeat itself.
To use another example: In the face of all past experience, scientists designed a miracle vaccine to avoid severe illness from the worst viral infection in a century, and got it to market within less than a year. And then, nearly alone among industrialized countries with access to the treatment, Americans decided in large numbers not to take it, so when a more dangerous strain of the virus came around, it started killing people in large numbers.
When you can’t hand out a big bag of money, nobody trusts you to be able to do much of anything.
We have the equivalent of 9/11 happening every few days, and we’re sleepwalking through the carnage, pretending that there are no interventions available to stop the spread, promoting distorted notions of freedom over trying to save lives. The party that’s in control of most states has just two primary core talents: selling quack supplements and lowering taxes. In a public-health emergency, only the former applies, so a chunk of the nation is composed of horse paste pitchmen. But even blue states don’t have the courage to protect the public: California just bowed out of requiring vaccines for entry into indoor businesses.
But ain’t that America. We have tons of available land and not enough homes. We know precisely what results from a boiling planet and choose to do the bare minimum, if anything, to stop it. We have more military firepower than practically every country on Earth combined but cannot win wars, because what we call “wars” these days are mostly profit-taking exercises directed by useless management consultants. We have national wealth unparalleled throughout most of history, and yet something like 40 percent of the population couldn’t scrounge up $400 in an emergency. The hollowed-out domestic industrial base, combined with the pandemic, has caused such a global shipping crisis that retailers have to charter their own boats to get the cheap Chinese goods they sell us into their stores.
In other words, when one affordable-housing advocate reacted to the tragedy of the slow rollout of rental assistance by saying, “Nobody is this incompetent,” I had to disagree. We are this incompetent. A buildup of complex rules and conventions, a predominant posture of fear of political reprisal, a handover of government functions to business managers and corporate CEOs, and the transformation of political disputes into a tribal war: All of this has crippled governance in the United States.
More than anything, this is the reason for the receding popularity of every government that has gained power in the last 35 years. When you can’t hand out a big bag of money, nobody trusts you to be able to do much of anything. Voters swing wildly from one party to another until their inadequacies are quickly revealed. Joe Biden has tried in a couple of respects to break out of this cycle. But it hasn’t been enough. We have choices to turn this around. We don’t have to be an empire in retreat.
