Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo
Outside the Capitol, protesting the expiration of the nationwide eviction moratorium
The day before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction moratorium expired and millions of renters were faced with the sobering possibility of being tossed out of their homes, President Joe Biden issued a statement that would be darkly comic if it weren’t so tragic. “I call on all state and local governments to take all possible steps to immediately disburse” rental assistance funds, Biden declared, referring to the $46.5 billion made available in two coronavirus relief packages. “There can be no excuse for any state or locality not accelerating funds to landlords and tenants that have been hurt during this pandemic.”
In the previous five months in which that rental assistance has been available—we have statistics going back to February, when state and local governments began receiving funding, through the end of June—about $3.25 billion has been delivered to tenants and landlords. Biden was calling for 13 times that to be delivered in one day. It was like a souped-up version of the movie Brewster’s Millions, where Richard Pryor has to spend $30 million in 30 days to get a larger inheritance. And it begs the question: if state and local governments had the capacity to get rental relief out with that kind of speed, why wouldn’t they have done it from the beginning?
After a feat of organizing that featured Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) sleeping on the Capitol steps for the past few nights, on Tuesday Biden’s CDC did move to partially restore the eviction moratorium for 60 days. It was the right thing to do, and a testament to the importance of having elected officials with the determination and personal experience (Bush has been homeless) to fight to protect the most vulnerable.
Everything that’s gone wrong with the rental assistance program sprang from this design.
But a new moratorium just staves off the inevitable. Millions of people don’t have enough money to pay back rent. Estimates from the Right to the City Alliance indicate that there’s about $21.3 billion in total rental debt across the United States. Congress actually stepped up to provide those funds: More than twice that number has been allocated in rental assistance. If that money was parceled out at even a somewhat reasonable rate, there would be no crisis at all. But it hasn’t, and that’s the problem.
This horrifically designed and implemented program is the catastrophic result of a growing inattention to the functions of government. Anyone can write a law that theoretically improves lives and relieves burdens. But as I’ve written recently, without proper implementation, laws are just words on paper.
“We’re all learning every day,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) told the Prospect on a press call applauding the new CDC order. “What we’re learning is that the more barriers you put up to access aid, guess what? It’s harder to access the aid! I hope that this is something people take from this as we design the next round of assistance.”
How did we reach a scenario where Congress does more than what’s necessary to solve the problem—an exceedingly rare occurrence—and still doesn’t get the job done? It starts with the initial text of the first bill that included rental assistance, in December 2020. On page 2256 (and the fact that there’s a page 2256 and that’s not even halfway through the bill could be the first problem), it states that payments of rental assistance shall be distributed to state and local governments, not through a federalized program. On page 2266, there’s another curious passage, suggesting that a landlord or utility provider could “not agree to accept” payment from a state or local government entity, and the money would have to go directly to the household instead.
Then, there are all sorts of parameters for eligible households. One or more individuals in the household must have qualified for unemployment or experienced a “reduction in household income” or some other financial hardship they can attest to in writing; a risk of homelessness as a result of past due payments must be determined; the household income must be 80 percent of the area median or below (and those under 50 percent should be “prioritized”), with that income determined either for the calendar year of 2020 or the monthly income at the time of the application, which would have to be re-determined every three months; and they must not be receiving other rental assistance.
The problems here are easy to see. State and local governments do not have rental assistance programs just waiting to be funded. These had to be built, from scratch, with a complicated set of eligibility requirements to administer. And landlords would have at least a temporary veto over rental assistance by rejecting grantee money, requiring a multi-step process of the grantee giving the money to the household and then to the landlord. In an environment where rents are rising fast and landlords could benefit from removing the existing tenant and re-renting to someone else at a higher rate, that could come in handy.
Everything that’s gone wrong with the rental assistance program sprang from this design. I’ve written about these problems repeatedly. There are hundreds of idiosyncratic programs across the country, all with no expertise in benefit delivery and with limited funding to do outreach. The document requests for tenants are cumbersome and often inaccessible (some programs require online applications for families with no computer). And landlords are hesitant to take the assistance payments.
Rep. Jayapal said that her understanding, based on a briefing with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday, was that the requirement for landlord approval has changed in implementation. But when you have hundreds of different programs, filtering that change down to all of them itself becomes an implementation challenge. “We’re working on getting that information out,” Jayapal said.
Some states and localities have fared better than others, using eviction diversion programs and other tactics to marginally improve rental assistance. But even this hasn’t led to mass distribution of rental relief, and some notoriously landlord-friendly states, particularly in the South, are not likely to accelerate that now. (Maybe that’s why you shouldn’t have trusted them with handling rental assistance.)
This has been a constant theme for several months. There have been countless articles about it. Tenants have been screaming about waiting for rental assistance that has never come. It should not have suddenly dawned on either the White House or Congress that there was a deep problem with rental assistance that would necessitate extending the moratorium to prevent eligible tenants who couldn’t access relief from being evicted. In fact, at the time of passing the law it should have dawned on any sentient policymaker that delegating rental assistance to the states, and requiring them to meet the various demands and veto points put into the law, were a recipe for disaster.
If rental assistance had worked, the CDC’s weirdly rigid statement that the June moratorium extension would be the last one wouldn’t have mattered. If rental assistance had worked, Brett Kavanaugh’s stating in a concurring but non-binding opinion that he would only allow a future extension with “clear and specific congressional authorization” wouldn’t have mattered. If rental assistance had worked, the Biden administration’s doing nothing for a month after Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion, and signaling only two days before expiration that they were open to an extension and that Congress should pass one, wouldn’t have mattered. If rental assistance had worked, the House’s failure to pass an extension in 24 hours (a moot point anyway since there aren’t 60 votes in the Senate for it and there aren’t enough votes to overturn the filibuster) wouldn’t have mattered. And all this finger-pointing between the legislative and executive branches over who’s responsible wouldn’t have mattered, either.
It’s absolutely right for the CDC to issue a new order. On June 24, when the CDC extended the moratorium last time, average daily new coronavirus cases were at 12,063. By the expiration date on July 31, they were at 68,326. Changing circumstances do necessitate a new protective order. Even if the Supreme Court strikes it down, the time it will take to move through the court system buys more time to delay evictions and work on increasing payouts of rental assistance. Indeed, Kavanaugh predicated his opinion on allowing more time to get the rental assistance out; that could provide a rationale for one last extension.
But 60 days from now, it’s unlikely that all the money needed to cover back rent will be distributed. Changes in the law might help, but so would changes in the mindset of how policymakers think about program design. “All of our bills tend to go directly to the people who need them,” Jayapal said. “This again proves the point of why the progressive approach to this is often the correct approach.”
Make no mistake: we are in this mess because a fully funded Congressional program spent only 6 percent of its allocation in five months, leaving six million renters behind. We have a serious problem with government functioning in America, punctuated by an obsession with means testing and state experimentation that has turned everyone needing relief into an unpaid government bureaucrat, having their free time taxed with paperwork and endless hassles. House Democrats and the White House should spend less time trying to shift blame for these failures and more time designing ways for their stated ambitions to actually work.
