© AP/Charles Krupa
Luis Vertentes, tenant from East Providence, R.I. at an eviction hearing.
after the Democrats left Washington for the recess without extending an eviction moratorium set to expire on Saturday
. America's largest corporate landlords are about to make a killing.
An 11-month eviction moratorium that prevented tens of millions of Americans from losing their homes during the coronavirus-induced economic shutdown
expired on July 31, after Congress left Washington for recess without passing a bill to extend it.
The moratorium was put in place by the Trump administration last year and extended by the Biden administration in June, but
a Supreme Court ruling that same month stated that a further extension would require "clear and specific congressional authorization."
President Biden asked his allies in Congress to pass a bill extending the eviction ban, and House Democrats had enough votes to do so, but nevertheless did not.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put the failure down to not having "enough time to socialize it within our caucus as well as to build the consensus, especially in a time of Covid."
Pelosi's typically Washingtonian answer will do little to assuage the millions of Americans who are behind on their rent. A precise figure is hard to nail down, but
Moody's estimates that six million tenants are in arrears, while more than 3.5 million people told the US Census Bureau earlier in July that they face eviction within the next two months. As of Saturday, they are no longer protected from being turfed out onto the streets.
Comment: While 3.6M+ Americans are being tossed out of their housing and allocated funding has not arrived, Biden is still importing south-of-the-border migrants and has made a promise to thousands from Afghanistan. In queue are18,000 applicants and 53,000 family members while congress just authorized 8,000 more visas
signed into law last week.
The eviction system, which saw a dramatic drop in cases before a federal moratorium expired over the weekend, rumbled back into action Monday, with activists girding for the first of what could be millions of tenants to be tossed onto the streets as the delta variant of the coronavirus surges.
Landlords tired of waiting for federal rental assistance were in court hoping to evict their tenants, while families from Ohio to Virginia turned up before judges hoping for a last-minute reprieve. In Detroit, at least 600 tenants with court orders against them were at immediate risk.
Only about $3 billion of the first tranche of $25 billion had been distributed through June by states and localities. A second amount of $21.5 billion will go to the states.
More than 15 million people live in households that owe as much as $20 billion to their landlords, according to the Aspen Institute. As of July 5, roughly 3.6 million people in the U.S. said they faced eviction in the next two months, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey.
In Rhode Island on Monday, Gabe Imondi, a 74-year-old landlord, was in court hoping to get an eviction execution — the final step to push a tenant out of one of four housing units he owns in nearby Pawtucket. Imondi said he and his tenant both filed forms for the billions in federal aid meant to help keep tenants in their homes but so far, he said, he hasn't seen a cent of the state's $200 million share.
Around the country, courts, legal advocates and law enforcement agencies were gearing up for evictions to return to pre-pandemic levels, a time when 3.7 million people were displaced from their homes every year, or seven every minute, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University.
Some of the cities with the most cases, according to the Eviction Lab, are Phoenix with more than 42,000 eviction filings, Houston with more than 37,000, Las Vegas with nearly 27,000 and Tampa more than 15,000. Indiana and Missouri also have more than 80,000 filings.
While the moratorium was enforced in much of the country, there were places like Idaho where judges ignored it.
The destabilization of America is well underway - the real virus amongst us.
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