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Six Million Renters Face Eviction in Six Days
Why do governments hate renters so much?
Why do governments hate renters so much?
Less than one week from today, the federal eviction ban and foreclosure moratorium will expire — and the Biden administration plans to sit back, roll the dice, and see what happens next.
It’s an insane decision when you look at the troubling facts:
Six million renters face eviction.
Unpaid rent might be as high as $52 billion.
Minorities make up the majority of severely cost-burdened renters.
45% of Americans say they won’t get the vaccine. (One institute projects that “80% of all households struggling with rental debt are in counties experiencing a surge of virus cases because of the Delta variant.”)
If America doesn’t get serious about the universal human right of affordable shelter, the Covid-eviction combo will have catastrophic consequences for families across the nation.
And it begs the question: Why do governments hate renters so much?
The US government printed and spent more than $3 trillion last year, and plans to spend at least that much again next year, but just $46 billion was allocated for emergency rental aid. Why so little?
Why did the Department of Housing and Urban Development only receive a $23.5 billion slice of the pie, and why did they only spend $3.7 billion of it?
Why did the measly $46 billion Emergency Rental Assistance Program only give out $7.1 billion?
Considering that 115.4 million Americans (34.7% of the population) fork over their hard-earned after-tax dollars to 23.7 million extractive landlords, it’s wildly unfair that renters have received just 0.36% of the total support.
And let’s not forget that renters are the taxpayers footing the whole bill.
And let’s especially not forget the hyper-elites who have offshored their wealth, evaded taxation, and added $4 trillion to their net worth during the first year of the pandemic thanks to cheap interest rates, government support, financialization, and democratic interference.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her gang are rightly calling for another extension on the moratorium, but it only delays the inevitable, just kicking the can further down the road.
Here’s what we actually need to do instead:
Declare a debt jubilee
The Federal government should immediately pay off all $52 billion in back rent owing.
(I can hear the right-libertarian howls from here. They’d rather “let the market decide” — with one commenter even suggesting that if we’d never had an eviction ban in the first place, the market would’ve balanced itself in “a month or two.” As if uprooting millions of families can be written so callously, and as though moving millions of people at the height of a pandemic wouldn’t have been far more costly.)
$52 billion just isn’t really that much money. The military spends $52 billion every 2.6 days.$52 billion is just $161 per American.
And the money’s already sitting there.
In fact, there’s more than $1 trillion in approved Covid-relief spending that remains obligation-free.
Give renters 5.2% of it.
It’s only fair, considering renters are nearly 35% of the population. It’s only fair, considering billionaires aren’t paying their fair share.It’s only fair, considering renters are the ones footing a huge chunk of the bill and have been the most-shafted group so far.
All the money goes straight to their landlords anyway. Call it the Landlord Relief Bill.
It’s a win-win-win-win-win.
Landlords get paid.Renters get caught up.No one gets evicted.Delta variant cases don’t soar.We become a little fairer and more humanized as a society.
Once we do right by renters just this once, we can then move on to making sure this dangerous situation never happens again:
Otherwise, extending eviction moratoriums will become the new “raise the debt ceiling.”
And we all know how well that’s going.
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