Alice Nondorf on moving day in late January. Despite being eligible for rental assistance — and the protection of the CDC’s eviction moratorium — she and her partner received eviction notices in November.
Photographer: Luke TownsendAlice Nondorf spent the holidays waiting to be evicted from her home in Manhattan, Kansas.
Unable to work and relying on disability benefits, Nondorf says she had struggled to pay rent for her $700-per-month apartment since September. At the same time, she escalated complaints to the city about roaches, bats in the walls and broken appliances that she says the building’s new management failed to address. After her lease rolled over at the end of October, Nondorf and her fiancé, Gary LaBarge — who was living in an adjacent unit on a month-to-month lease, and who has stage 4 chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — received notices in November to vacate.
The couple applied for emergency rental assistance. They also filed the declaration forms required under the federal eviction moratorium issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in September. But attorneys for the landlord told Nondorf that the CDC order didn’t apply, since the landlords were simply declining to renew the couple’s leases. And while Nondorf and LaBarge were each eligible for up to $5,000 in rental assistance in Kansas, their landlord wouldn’t take the money.
“The CARES fund was there,” says Nondorf, who was served with an eviction order in mid-January. “We reached out to our landlord. ‘I know we owe rent. We’re not trying to screw you.’ They flat-out refused.” (Nondorf’s landlord, Rodney Steven III, confirmed the eviction but declined to answer other questions.)
The Kansas couple are among the thousands of households in the U.S. at risk of tumbling through gaping loopholes in the regime of federal, state and local orders designed to keep people housed during the pandemic. As newly appointed CDC Director Rochelle Walensky explained in her order extending the federal eviction moratorium on through March 31, preventing evictions is critical to contain the spread of Covid-19: Displaced households can end up homeless or crowded into shared apartments with friends or extended family, increasing the risk of infections. President Joe Biden made the federal eviction ban one of his Inauguration Day priorities. Yet eviction filings continue to mount by the thousands in courthouses across the country.
Nearly a year into the pandemic crisis, a much-feared nationwide “tsunami” of evictions has yet to materialize. Instead, changes in tenant protections have led to a more gradual groundswell in eviction filings. Legal challenges to remove tenants are up almost everywhere, according to a year’s worth of data across 27 U.S. cities tracked by Princeton University’s Eviction Lab and reviewed by Bloomberg CityLab. Even with the CDC moratorium in place and extended into spring, evictions are rising, which has advocates worried about displacement without more decisive federal action.
“Generally speaking, the CDC moratorium is doing what it was intended to do,” says Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “But there are many shortcomings in the order and an alarming number of evictions despite the moratorium. We have been calling on Biden and CDC Director Walensky to not only extend the moratorium, but to strengthen and improve and enforce the moratorium.”
Yentel and Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project, sent a letter to Walensky on Jan. 21 requesting a meeting to discuss ways to improve the federal eviction ban. A CDC official replied on Feb. 11, declining the invitation because of pending lawsuits over the order. Along with other tenant and housing leaders, the signatories of the letter point to problems plaguing the federal government’s efforts to support renters through the pandemic. Tenants need to know their rights in order to exercise them. Landlords can let the clock run out on a lease. Violations are rarely enforced. And most emergency rental aid programs require buy-in from landlords.
“The landlord has to sit down with you and do that paperwork, or you don’t get the money,” Nondorf says.
Beyond the CDC order, a patchwork of state and local protections protect millions of tenants in the U.S. from eviction. In many places, it's these local protections that make the difference in the swing in eviction filings.
In New York City, for example, eviction actions plummeted to zero back in March, shortly after the novel coronavirus surfaced in the U.S. and Congress issued the first federal eviction moratorium as part of the original CARES Act. At the same time, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo also issued a 90-day ban on all eviction proceedings, fully backstopping the federal order, which applied to many but not all renters. Once those federal and state orders lapsed over the summer, eviction filings picked back up again. Filings in New York City fell off once again in January, after the state passed the COVID-19 Emergency Eviction and Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2020, another ironclad eviction ban.
State and Local Orders Bring Down Evictions
Eviction filings per 100,000 residents
Sources: Eviction Lab, U.S. Census Bureau
Elsewhere, the story was different. Back in the spring, eviction filings also fell in Houston and Phoenix — where notorious “rocket dockets” typically process hundreds of evictions every day — but they never quite fell to zero. Since then, eviction proceedings have gradually gathered steam. For now, tenants in Harris and Maricopa Counties are protected only under the CDC order, which permits filings but does not allow evictions for nonpayment, so long as tenants can produce a declaration that qualifies them.
The strength of an eviction order comes down to the details and procedure. Under the recent law in New York, any and every notice that a landlord gives to tenants must be accompanied by a hardship declaration form. The form protects tenants from eviction under just about any circumstances — not just for nonpayment but for holdover proceedings, such as when a renter’s lease expires. That form shows up at every step along the way: When a landlord issues a five-day notice over late rent, tenants get the hardship declaration. If a landlord escalates with a rent demand, tenants get the hardship declaration. Once the court gets involved, the court, too, will make sure the tenants sees this form. Under the CDC moratorium alone, it’s up to tenants to know about their rights.
“Right now in New York, the federal moratorium is more lax than what our state moratorium is. The qualifications for the federal moratorium are less than what our state qualifications are,” says Lisa Faham-Selzer, partner at Kucker Marino Winiarsky & Bittens, a Manhattan-based law firm that represents commercial and residential property owners. The full stop on housing court proceedings in the state lasts through Feb. 28, and longer for those impacted by the pandemic. “If you are affected by Covid, and all you have to do is supply a little bit of a hardship declaration, you’re stayed through May.”
Evictions Are Rising Under the CDC Order
Eviction filings per 100,000 residents
Sources: Eviction Lab, U.S. Census Bureau
Around the country, local and state actions make all the difference. In Boston and Pittsburgh, filings spiked after state moratoriums expired, while local and state orders have kept eviction filings out of courts in Austin and Minneapolis. Generally, these orders have softened over time, as governors and courts have chipped away at them or as the clock ran out, even as the pandemic got worse. Winter is typically the slowest season for evictions, but the pandemic winter saw filings trending upward in cities across the U.S. As of February, few local or state orders remain.
Filings alone don’t tell the whole story. New York has expanded the right to counsel in eviction cases for tenants across much of the city. Between that and the state order, Faham-Selzer says, exceedingly few orders to vacate were ever served, even while landlords were able to legally file for eviction. Since the start of the pandemic, across all five boroughs, only a handful of eviction orders have been executed. Pressure may be building for a surge of evictions once the state order lifts.
At the same time, eviction filings alone are often enough to pressure a tenant to leave. In Kansas City, Missouri, activists with the group KC Tenants have tried to stop eviction filings by physically blockading the doors to the Jackson County Courthouse and disrupting Webex conferences to shout down online hearings. Tenant advocates in Jackson County have been especially heated since court deputies shot a man while they were serving him an eviction notice last month. A judge put a temporary stay on evictions in January; between the order and their direct actions, KC Tenants claim they prevented more than 700 evictions last month.
“We need immediate relief. An expanded eviction moratorium, including a ban on all eviction filings, summons, hearings, judgments, and writs of execution,” said Tiana Caldwell, board president for KC Tenants, in a call with reporters. “Biden should do this tomorrow. Congress should strengthen and expand it in the next relief bill.”
Pandemic Evictions Are Steady Across Cities
Current eviction filings per 100,000 residents and 2015-2019 average
Source: Eviction Lab, U.S. Census Bureau
Eviction filings haven’t reached pre-pandemic levels in most places. In Ohio, for example, 2020 filings have stayed mostly below average 2015–19 levels for Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus. It’s hard to know how many evictions are actually happening. A lack of data makes it incredibly difficult to track evictions even in normal times, and the pandemic presents some special obstacles to measuring housing precarity across the country. Thousands of landlords aren’t filing evictions now but may yet still; thousands of evictions, legal or otherwise, simply aren’t being recorded.
Calls for Reform
In their letter to Walensky, Yentel and Roller call on the CDC to overhaul the federal eviction moratorium. Housing advocates want to see a universal moratorium — one that applies whether tenants know it exists or not. The letter asks Walensky to block eviction filings, not just eviction orders or writs, to keep landlords from using the legal process to intimidate renters. The letter also appeals to the CDC to expand protections for nonpayment to cover no-fault evictions or hold-over evictions for tenants whose lease has ended. These changes would make the federal moratorium work more like the state-level orders that successfully brought eviction filings to nil.
Another request involves stiffening enforcement: Yentel and Roller call on the Biden administration to establish a national hotline number for tenants to report landlords who violate this beefed-up CDC moratorium — and for the U.S. Department of Justice and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to enforce its terms and penalties. Legal confusion also poses a threat. Numerous efforts to overturn eviction bans have failed thus far in federal court, although challenges continue. But at least three local state courts have blocked or invalidated the CDC order anyway since November, according to a letter to the DOJ from the American Civil Liberties Union and National Housing Law Project.
Eviction bans are unpopular with landlords, of course. Faham-Selzer says she represents a New York client in a case that started in 2018; the tenant hasn’t paid rent since 2016. Winter maintenance costs and property taxes still apply even if the rent (and mortgage) payments have stopped. As the pandemic stretches on, landlords say they are suffering, especially the smaller mom-and-pops. But the logic behind the CDC’s eviction order isn’t economic. Evictions lead to family members living together in greater numbers, speeding the spread of Covid-19; a universal eviction ban put in place at the start of the pandemic might have prevented thousands of deaths.
Tenant organizers and industry representatives alike agree on one solution to stop evictions: give tenants cash. Leaders of six left-leaning think tanks, including the Roosevelt Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, issued a letter on Feb. 1 to leaders in Congress calling for assistance above and beyond the $25 billion in emergency rental relief included in the December stimulus. Leaders with the National Apartment Association, National Association of Realtors and 10 other industry groups sent a separate letter on Feb. 4 to the House asking for the same.
But rental aid wasn’t any help to Nondorf, who says she was eligible for up to $5,000 through the Kansas Eviction Protection Program. That program — and many others like it — requires landlords and tenants to apply jointly, with the money delivered directly to landlords. “If you’re not in good with your landlord, there’s the first obstacle,” she says. Her experience isn’t atypical.
Barriers to Cash Assistance
For landlords, emergency aid comes with strings attached. A significant share of state emergency rental assistance programs (38%) require landlords to agree to not evict for some period of time, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. About one in five state programs (21%) ask them to waive late fees. A similar share (17%) require landlords to forgive some level of overdue rent.
These requirements can go further. In order for a tenant to participate in Philadelphia’s emergency rent assistance program, for example, their landlord must hold a valid rental license and be current on their taxes, in addition to agreeing to limitations on evictions and forgiving past-due rent. And the rental unit must meet a standard of habitability based on the tenant’s testimony. A survey released in December by the Reinvestment Fund and the Housing Initiative at Penn found that some 8,900 tenants applied for rental aid in Philly, but only a little more than 4,000 tenants got help, with many eligible applicants excluded because their landlords refused to participate.
So why would landlords opt out of thousands of dollars in potential government assistance they’ll otherwise never see again? For any number of reasons: beliefs about federal aid, confusion over the requirements, unease with the concessions, informal or unlicensed arrangements, interpersonal conflicts with tenants, or some combination of concerns. Race is almost certainly a factor in landlords’ decisions about evictions; Black tenants in Philadelphia face an annual pre-pandemic eviction rate (8.8%) that is almost three times higher than white tenants (3.1%). The vast majority of evictions filed in Boston since the start of the pandemic are located in areas with larger Black or immigrant populations.
For the $25 billion in emergency rental aid included in the stimulus package passed by Congress in December, tenants will be able to apply for relief directly if their landlords won’t comply. While this is ostensibly a measure to ease the administrative burden, it’s not clear how this is supposed to work in practice for the dozens of state or local aid programs that pay out directly to landlords or require their signatures.
“It creates a good opportunity for tenants to receive the payment, in the case where the landlord refuses, but there are a lot of barriers to the tenant applying themselves,” says Mariel Block, staff attorney for the National Housing Law Project. “There’s no requirement right now about tenants having an accessible portal to apply directly in the case when landlords refuse. A landlord can refuse and a tenant might not have an avenue to apply or figure out what to do.”
The hypotheticals only compound from there. If a landlord can’t or won’t accept assistance from the state, what is a tenant supposed to do with the money? Could a tenant whose landlord refuses to participate in a rental assistance program apply for aid to use as a down payment at a new apartment? Housing advocates are seeking guidance from Treasury about the bounds of the aid program.
The outlook for emergency assistance varies from place to place. Block says that the program works well in places like Seattle, where landlords can choose to either accept aid for every eligible tenant in their buildings or get none at all, leaving little opportunity for animus or malice. But landlords in other cities would likely resist the Seattle approach, she says; some cities don’t have the staff or technical expertise to ensure that emergency rental aid is administered smoothly. Programs that didn’t deliver aid efficiently before the pandemic — or didn’t exist at all — are being put to the test by a global emergency.
By far, the biggest obstacle to keeping tenants in their homes over the next year is the lack of funds. There’s not yet anywhere close to enough money to match the need, tenants and advocates say. With U.S. renters behind by as much as $70 billion, they will need at least a third round of stimulus. Biden has proposed another $30 billion for the package that Congress is currently debating. But many millions of dollars in aid may be lost due to red tape or landlord reticence. The only real solution to pandemic evictions would have been to have a broader working housing safety net before the crisis struck. That’s something that Biden has also pledged to address.
For her part, Nondorf says she and her fiancé only narrowly avoided being put out on the street. After the order for their evictions arrived in mid-January, they managed to secure federal income-based public housing. The week the couple were supposed to move, Covid-19 hit their moving company as well as staff at their new apartment building. They finally moved in late January, two days before sheriffs were due to arrive. Nondorf says that they are still pursuing their legal options over what they consider to be retaliatory evictions.
“We are doing better,” she says. “We are safe. We are in a place with clean hallways, working laundry machines, and someone who shovels the snow the next day. And no bats.”
