There's nothing in the big stimulus "phase 3" bill to protect the nation's 40 million rental households, and nothing really being discussed, and whole hell of a lot of people are going to get evicted come middle of April.
As millions of Americans are being told to stay inside their homes, eviction notices are still being issued by landlords across the country.
President Trump on Wednesday declared that the Department of Housing and Urban Development would be “providing immediate relief to renters and homeowners by suspending all foreclosures and evictions until the end of April."
But Trump misstated what is actually occurring.
The federal actions announced last week would protect more than 30 million homeowners from eviction, but they do not cover the nation’s 40 million renters. HUD issued a 60-day moratorium on evictions for homeowners who are unable to pay their federally backed mortgages. The Federal Housing Finance Agency also granted relief to homeowners with loans backed by two government-controlled companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Some public housing authorities, including New York, the largest in the nation, also imposed moratoriums on evictions, but that reprieve only applies to tenants in federally subsidized apartments.
While some governors, mayors, city councils and judges are taking action, most state- and municipal-wide moratoriums on evictions last only a few weeks. The day after Ferguson received her eviction notice, a Milwaukee judge ordered that sheriff’s deputies stop serving eviction orders in the county, but only until April 9.
Without a national moratorium on evictions, housing advocates say, some of the country’s most vulnerable people will lose the homes that could keep them from contracting the virus. Black and Hispanic Americans, who are more likely to be renters and work low-wage jobs, would be disproportionately affected.
“It’s important that there be a uniform policy that gives everyone in America an assurance that we won’t lose our home in the midst of a public health emergency,” said Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
It's almost assuredly not going to happen. People are going to be tossed out into the street starting a few weeks from now, and the nation's big rental management companies, that own hundreds of properties and tens of thousands of units, are going to start tossing thousands, maybe millions into the streets.
Unless Congress and Trump do something about a national moratorium, you're going to have millions of people told to shelter in place with no shelter to be placed in, and they will start dying. Not all of them from COVID-19, either.
There will be no help from the GOP. Increasingly the plan is to force states to end shelter-in-place and "restart the economy" at the end of the month.
President Trump and some of his senior officials are losing patience with the doctors’ orders.
The state of play: Amid dire predictions for jobs and the economy, the White House is beginning to send signals to business that there's light at the end of the tunnel — that the squeeze from nationwide social distancing won't be endless.
Trump tweeted at 10 minutes to midnight: "WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD [which began a week ago, March 16], WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!"
Vice President Pence, who heads the White House's Coronavirus Task Force, had signaled the change in tone earlier when he said the CDC will issue guidance today allowing people exposed to the coronavirus to return to work sooner by wearing a mask for a certain length of time.
Why it matters: Taken together, Trump’s tweet and Pence's comment supply the strongest public signals we've seen that the administration is looking for ways to get people out in the world again to fire up the economy — perhaps much sooner than Dr. Fauci would like.
Trump is responding both to his own instincts and to messages that key outside allies have been sending for days.
He retweeted a number of those outside allies echoing similar stances on Monday morning.
Between the lines: Senior Trump officials, including the president himself, have only limited patience for keeping the economy shut down. They are watching stocks tumble and unemployment skyrocket.
I fully expect Trump to make things extremely difficult for states that do not end emergency measures like school and work closures by April 1 at the latest, and he's going to make that clear this week, regardless of how many COVID-19 cases and deaths are evident by then.
Never mind that millions don't have jobs to go back to right now. Rent's due, gotta pay up.
Get back to work during the pandemic, you lazy parasites. We have profit to make!
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