In one of his first acts as President, Joe Biden extended, through March, the Centers for Disease Control moratorium that offers modest protection against eviction for about half of America’s renters. While this is better than nothing, it really only kicks the impending eviction crisis down the road.
The real solutions will require dealing with the growing concentrated ownership of rental housing by corporate landlords and the amassed overdue rents accumulated by more than 10 million Americans and their families. These debts averaged more than $5,000 per renter as of December and continue to grow each month.
Against this backdrop, a new report, which I co-authored, found that your tax dollars are being used to subsidize corporate landlords even as they continue to file evictions in the face of the growing pandemic.
The report, published by Jobs With Justice and Private Equity Stakeholder Project, found that 197 corporate landlords received more than $320 million in federal Covid aid, even as they filed more than 5,300 evictions against tenants who could not pay their rent, many of whom lost their jobs or who could not work because of Covid-19 illnesses. If these funds had been instead devoted to help renters rather than landlords, nearly 25,000 families could have had their rents paid from April through December.
This Covid aid is the latest in a string of federal, state, and local handouts to corporate landlords. The Obama administration supported government policies providing federally backed financing for private equity firms, scooping up tens of thousands of distressed properties following the 2008 housing crisis. These policies are at the center of the dramatic rise of corporate control of rental housing.
Corporate entities owned about 20 percent of the nation’s rental housing stock before the 2008 recession. Today private equity funds, real estate investment trusts (REITS), and other corporate landlords control nearly half of U.S. rental housing.
