The Biden administration on Thursday extended the nationwide ban on evictions for a month to help millions of tenants unable to make rent payments during the coronavirus pandemic, but said this is the last time it plans to do so.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, extended the evictions moratorium from June 30 until July 31. The CDC said, “this is intended to be the final extension of the moratorium.”
A Biden administration official said the last month would be used for an “all hands on deck” multiagency campaign to prevent a wave of evictions. One of the reasons the moratorium was put in place was to prevent further spread of COVID-19 by people put out on the streets and into shelters.
By the end of March, 6.4 million American households were behind on their rent, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. As of June 7, roughly 3.2 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.
The White House had acknowledged Wednesday that the emergency pandemic protection, which had been extended before, would have to end at some point. The trick is devising the right sort of off-ramp to make the transition without major social upheaval.
That includes giving tenants as much time as possible, and making sure both tenants and landlords are aware of any emergency relief funds that may be available.
This week, dozens of members of Congress wrote to President Joe Biden and Walensky, calling for the moratorium to be not only extended but also strengthened in some ways.
The letter, spearheaded by Democratic Reps. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Jimmy Gomez of California and Cori Bush of Missouri, called for an unspecified extension to allow the emergency rental assistance included in the American Rescue Plan to get into the hands of tenants.
Ending the assistance too abruptly, they said, would disproportionately hurt some of the minority communities that were hit so hard by the virus, which has killed more than 600,000 people in the United States. They also echoed many housing advocates by calling for the moratorium’s protections to be made automatic, requiring no special steps from the tenant to gain its protections.
But landlords, who have opposed the moratorium and challenged it in court, were against any extension. They have argued the focus should be on speeding up the distribution of rental assistance.
The Associated Press
