Patricia Mendoza lives in Imperial Beach, a four-and-a-half-square-mile city of about 29,000 people at the southwest edge of California. She is a single mother with two children, ages sixteen and nine, and until recently she was employed as a non-emergency medical transport driver earning about $2,000 a month.
“How many people are going to lose their homes, and what are you as an administration going to do about it?”
She lost her job at the end of March, when California Governor Gavin Newsom imposed a stay-at-home order to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus. Mendoza had little savings—rent took up about 70 percent of her monthly income, with the rest going for food and utilities. So when she lost her job, she had to stop paying rent.
“The last two weeks in March, I only worked four days,” she said in a phone interview. “I didn’t have money to pay rent, and I had to feed my kids and pay the bills.”
Mendoza’s story is not unusual. Two thirds of Imperial Beach’s residents are renters, a much higher percentage than the nation at large. Nationally, there are nearly 44 million households living in rental units, about a third of all households in the United States. According to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, more than 60 percent of renting households earn less than $50,000 and almost half of all rental households earn less than $35,000.
Alieza Durana, of the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, said the pandemic is exacerbating an existing housing crisis. Wages have been stagnant for most workers, she said, but rents have continued to rise, which puts significant pressure on household budgets and makes it nearly impossible for most renters to save. That means many families lack a cushion in the case of an emergency, like the loss of a job or an unexpected debt.
“We know from the Federal Reserve, among other places, that 40 percent of American families, pre-pandemic, would struggle to pay an emergency expense of $400,” she said. “It could be your car breaks down or you have to take your kids to the ER, whatever that emergency expense is.”
That emergency has hit for many renters, with the nation filing more than forty million jobless claims during the COVID-19 pandemic—which means the nation could be on the precipice of a new homelessness crisis. States including California, New York, and New Jersey have imposed a moratorium on evictions, as has the federal government. But the federal ban, as reported by Politico, applies only to federally backed rentals and is set to expire on July 24.
“How many people are going to be homeless?” Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, asked Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson at a June 11 hearing before the Senate Banking Committee. “How many people are going to lose their homes, and what are you as an administration going to do about it?”
Federal officials do not have an answer to Brown’s question, but advocates are bracing for an explosion.
Anya Svanoe, a spokesperson for Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Action, says moratoriums just delay the pain. Renters are freed from making rent payments, but the bill for those payments will come due when the moratorium ends.
“[The moratorium] leaves people in a situation where they’re indebted and owe thousands of dollars of back rent,” Svanoe says. They already are living on “what little savings they have just to buy food.” They can’t pay rent now, can’t save, and will not have the resources to cover their debt down the road.
“It’s not that we don’t want to pay rent,” she says by phone. It’s that she can’t. “If there is no rent forgiveness, even if I go back to work in June, I will owe for April and May. We are behind on rent.”
The National Coalition for the Homeless estimates that about 550,000 people are homeless on any given night; that figure is based on a biennial count done in January, and follows the definition set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The NCH says that definition “doesn't include families who have doubled up with friends or family, nor formerly homeless persons who are staying in apartments funded by HUD homeless dollars,” or people living in motels and vehicles.
Julia Orlando, director of the Bergen County Housing, Health, and Human Services Center in northern New Jersey, says the “tremendous numbers of food insecure” people could be a harbinger of what is to come, because “housing insecurity is [food insecurity’s] close first cousin.”
“It is troubling,” she says. “More people have applied for food stamps and are relying on food pantries. It’s not a clean number, but they are connected to each other.”
A recent analysis from Columbia University projects that nearly 250,000 more Americans will become homeless this year “if homelessness follows unemployment the way that it has done so in the earlier part of this century.” This would bring the total number of homeless to 800,000 on any given night by sometime this summer.
“If the projections of unemployment being made now turn out to be accurate, and the relationship between unemployment and homelessness follows the historical pattern, and no other major changes occur, that’s what we can expect to happen,” said the report’s author, Dr. Brendan O’Flaherty, a professor of economics at Columbia.
In preparation for an expected rise in homelessness, Bergen County has been aggressive in moving its homeless populations into housing. It follows a rapid-rehousing model that gets people into permanent homes and supplies them with resources that help them stay housed. This approach, Orlando says, has allowed the county to eliminate chronic homelessness.
“Homelessness, ideally, should be rare, brief, and nonrecurring,” she says. “So one of the things we’re trying to do in the facility now is house all these folks that were already homeless, to kind of pave the way to make room for all the new people that we're going to have to deal with.”
While rapid rehousing is important, tenants’ advocates say government action is needed to prevent the loss of homes in the first place. Many are calling for the cancelation of rent until after the economic crunch caused by the pandemic passes, though few communities are following through.
On June 3, the city council of Ithaca, New York, voted to seek state approval to cancel rent that would have been due between April and June for its 7,500 tenants and small businesses, according to the Ithaca Journal. Other municipalities and states are seeking extensions of moratoriums.
Vanessa Bulnes of Oakland, California, was laid off from her job as a childcare worker in March and she has not been able to pay her rent for April and May. The sixty-one-year-old receives unemployment and Social Security for her disabled husband, but says that money is not enough.
“It’s not that we don’t want to pay rent,” she says by phone. It’s that she can’t. “If there is no rent forgiveness, even if I go back to work in June, I will owe for April and May. We are behind on rent.”
Bulnes’s concerns are made concrete every time she steps out of her house. “People live in RVs and shanties,” she says. “Those are the kinds of things we are surrounded by, and I’m concerned about. It could happen to us.”
Mendoza has the same fears. She has asthma, which complicates her ability to work. There are jobs at grocery stores and other businesses that deal directly with the public, but they are low-paid and they could increase her risk of contracting COVID-19.
“I’m a driver,” she said. “How do I work from home? I don’t want to work at a supermarket, because of my asthma. My daughter tells me ‘Don’t go, who are we going to live with if you get sick?’ ”
Durana, of the Eviction Lab, notes that eviction is “a social construction. It’s not something that has to occur or naturally occurs.” Society could put supports in place that keep people housed, that prevent the legal process from removing people from their homes.
In the meantime, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Action is calling for rent forgiveness, funded by a growing cohort of corporate landlords so that smaller property owners are not penalized.
“We believe that it is the corporate landlords and the Wall Street actors who really made bank off of the last decade after the foreclosure crisis,” Svanoe says. “And who have made billions, even during COVID, and also have gotten a lot of public dollars. They should be the ones that should really pay the bail out.”