Even With The Eviction Moratorium, Landlords Continued To Find Ways To Kick Renters Out | Talking Points Memo

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This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1386387
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We spoke with an older couple who had rented from the same landlord for more than a decade. During the early months of the pandemic, they could manage to make only partial, but consistent, rent payments. In June 2020 – two weeks after asking for an extension on the next month’s rent – they came home to find that their landlord had changed the locks on their front door without informing them. He then refused to allow the couple to retrieve their possessions, leaving them to sleep in their car until they found a new place to live.

Good example regarding how landlords still found ways to kick out non-paying tenants during the moratorium. Tenants who can’t afford rent also can’t lawyers to fight back against these practices, even when done illegally.

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This is the kind of thing Legal Aid is for, but of course their funding is not of the best. And actions by landlords are (generally) only civil issues, even if they might be criminal when committed by others.

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I imagine there are small-time landlords who are in a real bind due to the pandemic. But actions like the one you mention are monstrous. And then there are the corporate landlords such as Kushner’s company, which are just money mills with no regard for human life. Disgusting.

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A lot of small-time landlords are in trouble indeed. But it’s not so much the fault of the impoverished tenants as the fault of states that are sitting on tens of billions of dollars in federal rental-assistance funds. (Yes, it’s hard to disburse all of that money in a timely fashion, but when a state hasn’t spent even a majority of the allocated money you have to think they’re not trying, or trying to do something else.)

And in the short-to-medium term evictions won’t help small landlords, because there aren’t millions of well-heeled prospective tenants looking to fork over deposits to occupy the newly-vacant properties. So I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s about ultimately getting even more properties into the hands of the big players.

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