After a hard time for renters, cities and states pass new protections

The coronavirus pandemic brought unprecedented hardship to renters, at one point leaving as many as 40 million people at risk of losing their homes.

That the situation got so bad, so quickly for tenants revealed long-lasting issues of housing instability in the U.S., caused by rapidly rising rents and stagnant wages, advocates say.

It also led to action.

Over the last two years, states and cities have passed dozens of laws granting tenants additional rights.

“The Covid pandemic has seen a new era of renter protections across the U.S.,” said Kshama Sawant, a member of the Seattle City Council.

“Facing this mountain of debt and a likely tsunami of evictions, tens of thousands of renters have responded by fighting back – organizing their buildings and uniting with tenants across cities and across the country,” she said.

Eviction rates were expected to balloon to historic levels during the public health crisis. Instead, they dropped off.

That reversal is due to the $45 billion pot of rental assistance allocated by Congress – for perspective, just $1.5 billion was earmarked for renters during the Great Recession – as well as the federal and local moratoriums on evictions, experts say.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced in September 2020 a nationwide ban on most evictions, and despite many legal challenges, that policy mostly remained in effect until this past August.

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In the absence of a federal eviction ban, many states and cities have kept their own limits on the proceedings in place, currently leaving half of renters in the U.S. with some protections against displacement.

New Jersey and New York’s eviction moratoriums will last until January 2022. Los Angeles, Seattle and Austin also still have citywide bans in effect.

Meanwhile, since federal rental assistance has been slow to reach people, Oregon, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada and Washington, D.C., allow renters to temporarily pause an eviction against them if they can show that they’re in the process of applying for the aid.

Before the pandemic, the federal government had never issued a countrywide ban on evictions. Locally, after certain natural disasters and the Sept. 11 terror attack, governors and courts announced just one week or two week-moratoriums.

Before Covid, 1 in 2 renters in the U.S. were considered rent-burdened, meaning a third or more of their income went to their housing, according to the Government Accountability Office. Many tenants spent over half of their earnings on their rent, research shows.

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