Evictions skyrocket as rising rents squeeze low-income Americans

John Yang:

Now that the Pandemic's renter protection programs have expired, eviction filing rates are soaring. Princeton University's Eviction Lab says that in some cities, the average weekly filings are more than 50 percent higher than they were before for the Pandemic. One reason is the rising rents and a shortage of affordable housing for those with the lowest incomes.

The National Low Income Housing Coalition says that to afford a modest two bedroom apartment, someone working a 40 hours week needs to earn between $16 and $42 an hour. That's much higher than the minimum wage in most states.

Diane Yentel is the CEO and president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which is an advocacy group. Diane, is this rebound or surge in evictions? Was this inevitable once these protections went away? Or is there something else going on, other factors going on?

Diane Yentel, National Low Income Housing Coalition:

You know, before the pandemic, we had about 10 million of the lowest income renters who were paying at least half of their very limited incomes towards rent just to keep a roof over their heads.

And of course, when you have such limited income to begin with, you're always one unexpected bill or financial shock away from missing rent, facing eviction, and in worst cases, becoming homeless. But the federal government stepped in really in unprecedented ways and provided protections and resources that kept millions of renters stably housed who otherwise would have lost their homes.

But just as those protections were expiring and those resources were depleted, renters were reentering really a brutal housing market where rents were skyrocketing and costs across the board had increased, and the lowest income renters are being squeezed more than ever. I'm talking about people who make less than 30 percent of the area median income.

So, for example, that's a family of four bringing in less than $25,000 in annual income. Or it's an individual senior or a person with disabilities who has a limited twelve to $15,000 a year income. So they have very little available to pay for rent and have enough money left over for all of life's other necessities.

And it's people of color who are most impacted and most harmed by the housing market. Black, Latino and indigenous people are disproportionately extremely low income renters due to decades of systemic racism and ongoing discrimination in many systems. And so they are disproportionately likely to be evicted or become homeless in our country.

John Yang:

And obviously becoming homeless has a big impact. But also, even if they aren't evicted, just getting that eviction filing against them has an impact.

Diane Yentel:

That's exactly right. Just a single eviction filing on somebody's record can create really a spiraling down into poverty that becomes very difficult for that family to climb back out of. It becomes more difficult for them to be able to find decent apartments and landlords that will rent to them. So they often are led to communities with lower performing schools or higher crime rates, which has all sorts of associated costs and challenges for that family, for the community, and really for the country.

John Yang:

You talked about how the pandemic protections sort of protected against that shock, and it was the pandemic that was the shock. Could in any sense that be a model for safety net programs for renters who do get that shock because of a medical bill? Because of some other factor?

Diane Yentel:

Oh, absolutely. The emergency rental assistance programs that were created during the pandemic are a success story. Congress provided 46 and a half billion dollars in emergency rental assistance and with those funds, communities created over 500 programs across the country to quickly get cash into people's pockets to pay the rent and stay stably housed.

So we absolutely should make this program permanent and permanently funded, keep this infrastructure that we built throughout the country, build off of these lessons that we learned, and continue to keep people stably housed into the future.

John Yang:

The other part of this, as you've said, is the lack of affordable housing. Are there efforts that you think are particularly successful in trying to solve that problem?

Diane Yentel:

So there is a tremendous shortage of homes, and especially for the lowest income people, there is a gap of 7.3 million homes affordable and available to of the lowest income people. So another way of saying that same number is for every 10 of the lowest income households, there's just a little over three homes that are affordable and available to them. And that gap grew pretty substantially during the pandemic

So there's a number of ways that we can fill that gap. We can fill it through short term emergency rental assistance programs, through longer term rental assistance, through preserving and building more apartments that are affordable to the lowest income people, and by creating and enforcing really robust tenant protections. But it's going to require increased political will at all levels to be able to get the solutions at the scale needed to truly address this challenge.

John Yang:

Diane Yentel of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Thank you very much.

Diane Yentel:

Thanks so much for having me.