As Many As 6.2M Renters Could Face Eviction Post-Moratorium

The country may grapple with a ‘new pandemic’ of evictions once the CDC’s national eviction moratorium, which was extended last week, eventually expires, according to new research from Surgo Ventures. 

The firm’s county-level analysis shows that about 6.2 million renting households were behind on rent as of July 31, an amount that represents about 15% of the total renting population in the US.  In about 250 counties across the country, more than one in five renters are behind on payment.

The average bill is $3,700 per household in arrears, a total of $23 billion nationally.  Renters in the South have been impacted the most, with 16% of households in arrears and $8.4 billion owed. The Northeast also has 16% in arrears, but that amount is dispersed across larger metro areas.

“Ever since the early days of COVID-19, we’ve been concerned about ‘vulnerability,’ a term we use to define a community’s ability to weather this pandemic based on a number of structural, socioeconomic, and health-related factors. Housing vulnerability is very much a part of this equation,” said Dr. Sema Sgaier, Co-Founder and CEO of Surgo Ventures and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We believe there are sufficient federal and local funds to cover our most vulnerable families; we just need to make sure they are distributed appropriately so that at-risk families have the financial and programmatic support they need to stave off a crisis.”

That was reportedly one of the drivers behind the recent eviction ban— that is, policy makers wanted more time to distribute the federal renter relief funds that have been achingly slow in reaching tenants and landlords. 

However this most recent extension of the federal moratorium has already been met with a bevy of lawsuits challenging the legality of the move, including a complaint filed by the National Apartment Association, Darby Development Company, GWR Management, McLean Investments, and Shander International.

“The Biden Administration’s new eviction moratorium is bad policy that fails to address the nation’s existing, and growing, level of rent debt,” Bob Pinnegar, president and CEO of the National Apartment Association, told GlobeSt.com in an earlier interview. “Rather than eviction moratoriums, the rental housing industry wants to see rental assistance distribution drastically streamlined.”

Jay Parsons at RealPage has made the case that evictions won’t reach levels predicted by Surgo and other analysts for various reasons here. He says that while evictions are a “lose-lose,” “we’ll likely end 2021 with far fewer evictions than we saw in a typical year pre-pandemic,” and says data sets like those from the National Multifamily Housing Council, which collects rental collection information on 11.5 million units nationwide, show healthier collections data.