Nolte: Riots, Lockdowns Implode Rental Markets in Democrat-Run Cities
“Renters have never had so many options in Manhattan,” reports Bloomberg. “The number of apartment listings in New York’s most expensive borough has tripled from last year, the highest figure for vacancies in recent history. Asking rents in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens have imploded.”
“Yet the renters are staying away,” Bloomberg continues. “Since the beginning of the pandemic, cities on both coasts have seen sharp declines in average rents, even double-digit dips for some.”
I encourage you to read the full story. For those of us who live in the real world, who have not had our perspectives violated and cracked by the national media’s surreal and skewed bubble, none of this is anything other than what intelligent people expected. So while the numbers are not surprising, it is still quite an experience to read them.
Let me summarize the best I can…
In 30 core cities, the average rental price has plummeted by an average of more than five percent, while rents in the suburban areas around those cities are up a half-point. This is not due to some big swing in a riot-prone Chicago, Seattle, or Portland skewing everyone else. In 27 of these 30 cities, “suburban rents are outpacing city rents.”
This collapse is also not due to stagnation. People are not staying put. In fact, Rob Warnock, a research associate at Apartment List, says, “We do see people moving effectively at the rate they would be moving right now if there were no pandemic.”
In Charlotte, rents are down two percent while the suburbs are up five. In Dallas, rents are also down two percent. Seattle crashed seven percent. In Silicon Valley, there’s been an 11 percent drop. Boston is down eight percent, New York down 13 percent, and San Francisco down 18 percent.
Come on, y’all…
It’s not the coronavirus… It’s these stupid and unnecessary lockdowns and restrictions. I’ve lived in a couple big cities. It can be great to live in a city, but not if you’re trapped in a small apartment or home for months and months and months… Especially when you’re locked down by your Democrat leaders for no valid reason other than to hurt Donald Trump’s re-election chances.
Out in the suburbs and rural America, even if your shitty, fascist Democrat governor *cough*RoyCooper*cough* locks you down for no reason, you can at least go outside. You have a porch, a deck, a yard, a field… And in my case, all four.
I can’t imagine being stuck in a 600 square foot apartment for weeks, much less months, especially with no access to the outdoors other than a window you probably aren’t allowed to open.
Hilariously, what Bloomberg conspicuously omits entirely from this analysis is months and months and months of left-wing rioting in almost all of these Democrat-run cities. And it is not just the rioting itself. It is that if you live in a Democrat-run city, even a nice and quaint place like Kenosha, Wisconsin, you are living under the constant threat of riots.
As we’ve seen, Black Lives Matter and Antifa are looking for any reason to burn your city down. And Democrat mayors and governors are looking for any reason to allow them to burn your city down because they believe this helps them politically.
As I write this, in one Democrat-run city after another, stores and municipal buildings are being boarded up in anticipation of election night rioting. If Biden wins, there won’t be any rioting. Trump supporters are not barbarians. But if Trump wins, what we’ve witnessed over the past months will be nothing compared to what’s coming. Democrats will be determined to burn it all down, while their elected official and media cheerlead every act of arson, looting, and murder.
This is supposed to be the United States, not Fallujah.
Another major problem is cities like San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles that are so incompetently governed by Democrats, and have been for decades, are literally turning into dystopias with massive wealth gaps that create a small and powerful left-wing elite untouched by their own policies, and everyone else, who are left to simmer and fester in communities teeming with homelessness, crime, bad roads, illegal immigrants, and lousy government services. They’re choking on smoke from forest fires caused by environmental insanity; dealing with over-priced housing and too little housing, caused by that same environmental insanity; their wages and job opportunities undercut by illegal immigrants; their schools failing and over-funded. It’s pure madness.
We’re not supposed to have to live like this, and out here in the hinterlands, we don’t.
But these idiots keep voting for Democrats, and you get what you vote for, and what you get when you vote for Democrats is high taxes, unnecessary lockdowns, and violence.
And if Biden does win the presidential election, the lockdowns are going to get worse. Much worse.
So of course sane people are fleeing this insanity. Let’s just hope they don’t behave like the locusts in infested Red States like Colorado and Virginia and turn them Blue. Then we’ll never be able to escape the feckless, incompetent, and fascist Democrat rule.
As
the decay of American capitalism accelerates, it will be reflected in
increasingly degenerate displays of greed and opportunism by the ruling class.
Gig workers hired to evict people from their homes as
millions struggle to pay rent
A startup
company by the name of Civvl is seeking to recruit temporary “gig” workers to
assist landlords in evicting tenants who have been unable to pay rent in the
midst of the economic depression triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.
Civvl
is owned by OnQall, a developer that provides a platform for a number of other
app-based services. However, Civvl is markedly different from the other apps,
some of which are used for house-cleaning and mowing lawns.
The
startup, described by VICE News as “Uber, but for evicting
people,” has posted ads across the US looking for gig workers to join eviction
crews to assist in what the company’s website calls “debris removal.” In other
words, it is hiring people to clear out the possessions of evicted people.
Like
opportunistic vultures, the company’s owners seek to take advantage of an
economic crisis in which millions are unemployed and cut off from federal
assistance. Desperate workers—in many cases struggling to pay rent
themselves—are now to be utilized by the startup to evict other struggling
people for the purpose of turning a profit.
The
startup’s own website declares it to be the “FASTEST GROWING MONEY MAKING GIG
DUE TO COVID-19.” The website assures its clients that “Civvl gets them out!”
amid photos showing furniture and other possessions being hauled out into the
streets with police standing by.
As
Civvl’s Craigslist ads explain, “Unemployment is at a record high and many
cannot or simply are not paying rent and mortgages.” It continues: “We are
being contracted by frustrated property owners and banks to secure foreclosed
residential properties. ... There is plenty of work due to the dismal economy.”
Amid
a stream of bad press, the company adjusted the language on its website to
indicate that it does not, in fact, carry out the evictions. However, this
appears to be contradicted by the fact that among the positions listed is that
of “process server,” a person who would be contracted with serving court
documents and posting eviction notices on properties. Other services include
that of “eviction standby.”
As
for the legality of the evictions, the company makes clear in its terms of
service that it is merely carrying out the dirty work of the landlord, who
assumes all legal responsibility.
Many
have expressed outrage over such blatant profiteering from the growing misery
of masses of people. VICE News spoke with Helena Duncan, a
Chicago housing activist and paralegal. “It’s f*cked up that there will be
struggling working-class people who will be drawn to gigs like
furniture-hauling or process-serving for a company like Civvl, evicting fellow
working-class people from their homes so they themselves can make rent,” she
said. Others expressed their indignation on Twitter with one user tweeting: “These
people are just evil.”
The
absurdity and criminality of this state of affairs will not be lost on workers.
A CNN report on evictions from September 2 featured the eviction of an elderly
Houston woman who could no longer afford to pay her rent. As the landlord’s
mover hauled out her possessions, he lamented, “Maybe today it’s her, tomorrow
it’s me.”
The
CDC has imposed a moratorium on evictions effective through December 31, 2020.
However, this hasn’t stopped landlords from resorting to illegal methods
to evict their tenants, including utility shutoffs and
intimidation tactics.
The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) moratorium has been subject to
different interpretations among varying state and local governments, leaving
many low-income and vulnerable tenants at risk for eviction and homelessness.
Avery
Kreemer, the founder of Ohio Eviction Watch, recently spoke to the WSWS on the eviction crisis in the
state. He explained: “Each county and each court will interpret the moratorium
differently,” said Kreemer. “One of our reporters lives up in Akron, and
someone from the Legal Aid Society told her about a woman who lives on the
county line. The court she lives under decided she was not covered under the
CDC order, but if she had lived two miles to the west she would have been
protected under that court.”
Despite
the CDC moratorium, many renters are unaware of the protections available to
them, and landlords take advantage of this ignorance to carry out illegal
evictions. In some states, tenants must fill out a declaration in order to
remain exempt from eviction. In other states, such as Maryland, tenants may be
required to provide documentation to assert that they qualify for exemption.
Phillip
DeVon, an eviction prevention specialist at the Chicago-based Metropolitan
Tenants Organization (MTO) told VICE, “One thing we know
just from experience, especially with housing: just because something is
technically legal, doesn’t by any stretch mean that it’s right, ethically
speaking.” Regarding Civvl, DeVon said, “With this particular company, it
sounds like they’re doing what landlords often do, which is prey upon a lack of
knowledge and information about people’s rights.” He added, “It’s very
dishonest. … It’s like, ‘Oh, don’t call us a hitman. We don’t pull the trigger!
We just connect you with someone who’s willing to.’”
The
eviction crisis in the US, as part of the broader social catastrophe brought
about by the pandemic depression, is rapidly assuming monstrous dimensions.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), which is
tracking growing rates of unemployment, hunger and general hardship, some 11.8
million adult renters—or nearly 1 in 6—were unable to pay their rent last
month.
The
CBPP acknowledges this to be a significant undercount since younger, less
educated, and Black and Hispanic renters—demographics that are statistically
more likely to be struggling to pay rent—were less likely to respond to the
survey. The advisory firm Stout Risius Ross conducted an analysis that
concluded that as many as 34 million people may be at risk for eviction.
Unemployment, which is closely tied to
difficulties paying rent, is still at record highs. The CBPP, having analyzed
the Census Bureau population survey, concluded that some 31 million people were
unemployed, or lived with an unemployed family member. Among them are 7 million
children. The CBPP further acknowledges this to be an undercount, since it
doesn’t include workers who have been furloughed, workers who have given up on
looking for a job, and people who are caring for sick relatives and/or their
children because of closed schools. If the family members of these workers are
counted, some 54 million people—1 in 6 in the country—live in households with a
disenfranchised worker.
The
owners of Civvl clearly anticipate the avalanche of evictions that is coming.
Its website states frankly, “Moratorium ends Dec 31, 2020,” and urges landlords
to “Secure your booking and act fast.”
While
the company is rightly receiving widespread condemnation, it would be mistaken
to characterize this phenomenon as an anomaly. The entire capitalist system is
predicated on violence and exploitation.
The
appearance of a startup such as Civvl is merely the odious expression of an old
maxim, made infamous by Democrat Rahm Emanuel, “You never want a serious crisis
to go to waste.” The opportunism of Civvl is reflected on the grand scale by
pharmaceutical companies such as Regeneron, which is set to make a fortune from
its Covid-19 treatment. Even though the project was federally funded—to the tune
of hundreds of millions of dollars—the treatment will likely be unaffordable
for a great majority of the population, even as the company’s
executives—already the highest paid in the industry—are due to receive billions
of dollars.
In
an economic system that subordinates everything, even human life, to the
accumulation of wealth, it is perfectly logical to take advantage of a
situation in which millions of human beings may be expelled from their homes. A
bourgeois political economist would undoubtedly praise the entrepreneurial
spirit displayed by Civvl’s owners, as well as the genius of their business
model: utilizing unemployed poor people to remove other poor people from their
residences.
The
despicable attempts by this startup to prey upon the misery afflicting millions
of working people is mirrored by the machinations of a ruthless financial
oligarchy that has taken advantage of the pandemic crisis to engineer a
multitrillion-dollar bailout to itself. The ecstatic booming of the stock
markets and the exorbitant increase in the wealth of the richest 1 percent are
to be contrasted with the growth of severe poverty and misery among the masses
of the working class.
This
is not an aberration, it is the inevitable result of capitalism, and it is how
the system is designed to function. As the decay of American capitalism
accelerates, it will be reflected in increasingly degenerate displays of greed
and opportunism by the ruling class.
THE LOOTING OF AMERICA
KAMALA HARRIS AND HER GOLDMAN
SACHS BANKSTER STEVEN MNUCHIN
A tidy corrupt partnership
https://kamala-harris-sociopath.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-looting-of-america-kamala-harris.html
She
also declined to prosecute OneWest, run by now-Treasury Secretary Steven
Mnuchin from 2009-2015, after her own prosecutors said they discovered over a
thousand violations of foreclosure law committed by the bank. (OneWest donated $6,500 to Harris' attorney general
campaign in 2011, and Mnuchin himself donated $2,000 to her Senate campaign in
2016.)
GRIFTER AND PHONY CHARITY FOUNDATION
FRAUDSTER HILLARY CLINTON’S LONG SERVICE TO AMERICA’S MOST EVIL BANKSTERS
https://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-democrat-party-grifter-and-pay-to.html
The judge found these releases, together with
the publication of Clinton’s secret speeches to Wall Street banks, in which she
pledged to be their representative, were “matters of the highest public
concern.” They “allowed the American electorate to look behind the curtain of
one of the two major political parties in the United States during a
presidential election.”
“Clinton also failed to mention how he and Hillary
cashed in after his presidential tenure to
make themselves multimillionaires, in part by taking tens of
millions in speaking fees from Wall Street bankers.”
VIDEO:
THE FRAUDULENT CLINTON FOUNDATION EXPOSED.
PAY-TO-PLAY FROM THE FIRST DAY!
Is it a signal that she's back in the game
because she's selling her president-ability to the world's global billionaire
crowd and laying the groundwork for more funds? There are all kinds
of ways for foreign billionaires to get money to the U.S. without consequences,
after all. What's more, it's pretty much the biggest base of support
she has, which is at least one reason why she lost the 2016 election.
“The couple parlayed lives supposedly spent in
“public service”
into admission into the upper stratosphere of American wealth, with incomes in
the top 0.1 percent bracket. The source of this vast wealth was a political
machine that might well be dubbed “Clinton, Inc.” This consists essentially of
a seedy money-laundering operation to ensure big business support for the
Clintons’ political ambitions as well as their personal fortunes.
The basic components of the operation are
lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street and Fortune 500 audiences, corporate
campaign contributions, and donations to the ostensibly philanthropic Clinton
Foundation.”
"But what the Clintons do is criminal because
they
do it wholly at the expense of the American people.
And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain
power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends.
They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has
no core beliefs beyond power and money. That
should be clear to every person on the planet by
now." ---- Patricia McCarthy
THE LOOTING OF AMERICA:
BARACK OBAMA AND HIS CRONY BANKSTERS set
themselves on America’s pensions next!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/04/obamanomics-assault-on-american-middle.html
The new aristocrats,
like the lords of old, are not bound by the laws that apply to the lower
orders. Voluminous reports have been issued by Congress and government panels
documenting systematic fraud and law breaking carried out by the biggest banks
both before and after the Wall Street crash of 2008.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Bank
of America and every other major US bank have been implicated in a web of
scandals, including the sale of toxic mortgage securities on false pretenses,
the rigging of international interest rates and global foreign exchange
markets, the laundering of Mexican drug money, accounting fraud and lying to
bank regulators, illegally foreclosing on the homes of delinquent borrowers,
credit card fraud, illegal debt-collection practices, rigging of energy
markets, and complicity in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.
PATHOLOGICAL LIAR BARACK OBAMA MOCKS TRUMP
Obama orchestrated the greatest transfer of wealth to the rich in
U.S. history!
http://globalistbarackobama.blogspot.com/2018/09/pathological-liar-barack-obama-mocks.html
THE WALL STREET BOUGHT AND OWNED DEMOCRAT PARTY
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/09/democrats-and-bankster-billionaire.html
SERVING BANKSTERS, BILLIONAIRES and INVADING ILLEGALS
THE CRONY CLASS:
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2014/12/obamanomics-at-work-depressed-wages-and.html
“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic
Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New
Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an
ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO
E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994
Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has
helped create the largest prison population in the world.”
GET THIS
BOOK!
Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His
Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses
BY TIMOTHY P CARNEY
Editorial Reviews
Obama Is Making You Poorer—But Who’s Getting Rich?
Goldman Sachs, GE, Pfizer, the United Auto Workers—the same “special interests”
Barack Obama was supposed to chase from the temple—are profiting handsomely
from Obama’s Big Government policies that crush taxpayers, small businesses,
and consumers. In Obamanomics, investigative reporter Timothy P.
Carney digs up the dirt the mainstream media ignores and the White House wishes
you wouldn’t see. Rather than Hope and Change, Obama is delivering corporate
socialism to America, all while claiming he’s battling corporate America. It’s
corporate welfare and regulatory robbery—it’s OBAMANOMICS TO SERVE THE RICH AND
GLOBALIST BILLIONAIRES.
Nearly 10,000 eviction actions filed across the US since
September despite CDC moratorium
·
·
·
According to a recent report by
NBC News, some 10,000 families face eviction from their homes due to a surge in
filings by big residential landlord companies since the beginning of September.
If approved, these evictions
will be carried out across the country in several states hit hard by the
COVID-19 pandemic and despite a federal moratorium on evicting those affected
by the virus.
In Arizona, Florida, Georgia,
Tennessee and Texas, large corporate landlords such as Progress Residential,
have filed eviction proceedings for thousands of residents as a dramatic
explosion in the homelessness crisis looms due to the devastating economic
impact of the pandemic and the expiration of local, state and federal
restrictions put in place earlier this year.
Homeless camp
in San Francisco. (Image Credit: Envato)
Millions of American workers
have lost their jobs and some 12.6 million have suffered heavy cuts in income
since March, resulting in millions of families falling behind on monthly rent.
One worker interviewed by NBC
News, Cristina Valez, lost her job and was facing an over $2,000 rent bill she
could not afford. Her landlord, Progress Residential, she says was
unsympathetic and uncooperative in working with her considering her economic
situation.
Landlords are not required by
law to inform tenants of any protections they may have and can proceed with
evictions when rent is late.
“There’s got to be something
for people affected by COVID and being furloughed,” Valez told NBC. A
representative for Progress replied, “There’s nothing we can do” and served
Valez with a bill for over $4,000 in rent and legal fees or else an order to
vacate the premises. “I told them I was affected by COVID, but it didn’t matter
to them. They are not very patient,” Velez said.
According to the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) moratorium on evictions, which went into
effect in early September and expires at the end of December, landlords cannot
evict tenants affected by COVID-19 as long as they can show that the pandemic
has negatively impacted their ability to pay rent.
In order to be protected, the
CDC stipulates the tenant must prove that they meet 5 criteria: that they
sought government assistance, make less than $99,000 a year, have suffered a
“substantial loss of income” due to the pandemic, they must show they are
making an effort to pay as much of the rent as they can, and that eviction
would leave them homeless.
However, according to a
clarification by the CDC, landlords can proceed with the legal procedures of an
eviction as long as tenants are not forced out before the end of the year and
landlords are also not required to tell residents of the federal ban.
Landlords can also challenge
their tenants’ claims of COVID-19 impact and deny their claims without an
appeal process in place. This caveat was implemented in part due to landlord
lobbying groups directly appealing to the Trump administration.
This whitling down of the
formerly broad-based ban on evictions by the CDC has essentially placed all the
power in the hands of landlords, resulting in the current deluge of evictions.
Diane Yentel of the nonprofit
National Low Income Housing Coalition told NBC News the whittling down of the formerly
broad-based ban on evictions “puts more power back in the hands of landlords at
the expense of low-income renters.” Yentel said of the CDC’s clarification, “It
creates new burdens for renters and creates new holes in protections for
renters.”
The clarification was posted on
October 9 and almost immediately there was a jump in eviction proceedings with
some 2,000 having been filed across five states during the week of October 12.
For their part, the landlord
companies carrying out these evictions have told reporters that they are doing
everything according to the law and the rules of the CDC moratorium.
Landlord lobbying groups have
fought such bans since the beginning of the pandemic, calling them an overreach
and an obstruction on landlords’ ability to make profits. In September,
according to a recent report, some 6 million households were unable to make
rental payment.
Many of the largest landlord
companies are controlled by private equity firms whose stock holdings have
soared in value since the beginning of the pandemic. One of these big firms,
Invitation Homes, owns some 80,000 homes across the country and has filed 122
evictions over the last six months while its stock has climbed 80 percent
according to the nonprofit Private Equity Stakeholder Project which has
compiled statistics on private equity firms buying up community properties
across the country.
Progress Residential has filed
97 evictions since the beginning of the CDC moratorium. The company is itself
owned by an equity firm called Pretium which is run by former Goldman Sachs
partner David Mullen, a credit and mortgage manager who was investigated by a
Senate committee following the housing crisis of the late 2000s.
Progress Residential defends
its actions as being fully within the law while at the same time many of the
actual evictions do not comply even with the laws as favorable as they are for
the landlords.
According to renters’ advocacy
groups, most judges accept the terms of an eviction even if it technically
falls within the stipulations for protection. For the vast majority of those
facing eviction finding a new home will be increasingly difficult as evictions
often appear on the resident’s credit report and landlords often use such black
marks to refuse to rent.
Since the CDC now allows
landlords to file eviction proceedings, they are able to use this as an
intimidation tactic, forcing residents to move who may otherwise have been
protected by the moratorium without going through the full eviction process.
For millions of workers across
the country the threat of homelessness is ever present and with the moratorium
set to expire at the end of the year the crisis is set to explode even further.
For many workers even the threat of an eviction represents a plunge into deeper
poverty as landlords are free to pile on late charges and legal fees in
addition to the past due rent.
The
housing crisis and spike in poverty are only exacerbated in the backdrop of a
pandemic that has shown no sign of slowing as the current “third wave” of
infections wreaks havoc leading to deeper strains on an already brutalized
working class facing sickness and job loss and homelessness, while the big
banks and corporations were handed trillions of dollars in bailout funds.
Ten percent of US households face eviction by year’s end
Katy Kinner
21 October 2020
·
·
·
·
·
On January 1, the Center for
Disease Control emergency evictions moratorium will expire, raising the
existing US eviction and homelessness crisis to unprecedented proportions.
While tens of thousands of
evictions have been filed throughout the pandemic, according to a recent report by the Aspen Institute, 30-40
million more Americans could be at risk of eviction by the end of this year.
This is a staggering 10 percent of the American population.
In addition, millions of Americans
are at risk of being evicted from homes for non-payment of mortgages. According
to mortgage analytics firm Black Knight, 3.9 million households were not paying
their mortgages as of late August.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic,
over 20.8 million renter households—almost half of all US renter
households—were “rental cost-burdened,” a term defined as households who pay
over 30 percent of their income towards rent. Twenty-five percent of rental
households were spending over 50 percent of their income on rent before the
pandemic. The higher a household’s rental cost-burden, the more likely they are
to become evicted.
Amanda Wood,
23, waits to fight an impending eviction notice July 31, 2020, at the Greater
Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio. (AP Photo/Farnoush Amiri)
Some states, such as Ohio, are
more vulnerable to the eviction crisis due to insufficient COVID-19
protections, high poverty rates and high pre-pandemic eviction rates.
Avery Kreemer, the founder
of Ohio Eviction Watch, recently spoke to the WSWS on the
eviction crisis in the state. Ohio Eviction Watch seeks to establish a central
database for eviction information in the state by requesting and publishing
data from various courthouses around the state. As a result, Kreemer hopes to
illuminate the full scope of a crisis that is both growing and underreported.
“Our state legislature has been
ineffective with anything regarding Covid-19 measures,” Kreemer noted. “Since
March, proposals for eviction and foreclosure prevention haven’t gotten much
traction in the House or Senate. This is important because the CDC eviction
moratorium only goes into effect if there isn’t a pre-existing protection in
that state.”
Kreemer argues for additional
state-level action for many reasons, one of which being that the CDC moratorium
falls short. The CDC order, which went into effect on September 4, does not
stop evictions, but postpones them. The order makes it illegal for landlords to
evict tenants who sign a declaration that, among other things, they cannot
afford rent and make less than $99,000 a year as an individual, or double that
amount for a couple filing taxes jointly.
The order does not provide
funding for families to pay rent and it does not stop landlords from tacking on
late fees or contacting credit bureaus to alert them to missed payments. The
order also does not require landlords or courts to alert tenants to the many
stipulations required for eligibility under the order including the completion
of the declaration form.
Causing further confusion, the
order is inconsistent across states. “Each county and each court will interpret
the moratorium differently,” said Kreemer. “One of our reporters lives up in
Akron, and someone from The Legal Aid Society told her about a woman who lives
on the county line. The court she lives under decided she was not covered under
the CDC order, but if she had lived two miles to the west she would have been
protected under that court.”
According to data from The Eviction Lab,
a Princeton University research institute, Ohio’s eviction rate has surpassed
the national average for nearly two decades. In 2016, Ohio had an eviction rate
of 3.5 percent of rental households, which averages to about 158 evictions per
day and 57,980 evictions per year. For comparison, the US national eviction
rate in 2016 was 2.3 percent of renting households.
Several major cities in Ohio
struggled with even higher pre-pandemic eviction rates. Cincinnati had an
eviction rate of over 4.7 percent of renter households (4,174 evictions) in
2016, Cleveland reached 4.53 (4,483 evictions) and Columbus reached 4.45
percent (9,000 evictions).
In a discussion of the
pre-pandemic eviction rates in Ohio, Kreemer explained, “What’s interesting
about the CDC moratorium is that its focus is to stop the spread of COVID-19,
not to stop evictions. It’s strange that we waited for a global pandemic to try
to stop evictions.”
The idea for the Ohio Eviction
Watch project predates the pandemic. “I was working at the Dayton Daily News last
year when a tornado ripped through the area. It hit the poorest parts of the
city. As a result, there was a sort of mini housing crisis in Dayton. People’s
homes were unfit to live in, businesses shut down, many lost their jobs or lost
a way to reliably get to their jobs. We saw an increase in eviction filings.”
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER
1, 1PM US EST
On the Eve of the
Civil War Election
An online meeting
with Socialist Equality Party candidates Joseph Kishore and Norissa Santa Cruz.
Kreemer added, “Issues that
caused this [increase in eviction filings] weren’t fixed, no steps were taken
to solve it. Summer 2019 in Dayton becomes Summer 2020 across the whole
country.”
Asked how the broader political
situation relates to his project and the larger issue of evictions across the
nation, Kreemer said, “There are many goals in getting through this pandemic.
There are health goals and economic goals and there are many ways people
propose fixing the economy. But we judge our economy on how it functions for a
minority of people. If the stock market is going up it’s going to benefit the
people already holding a lot of wealth. If the jobs are increasing, great, but
are the wages of those jobs increasing? The strength of the economy isn’t
judged based on how many people are being kicked out of their homes.”
The growth in evictions will
lead to the further spread of the coronavirus as people are forced to double up
in homes, seek out homeless shelters, or fight against their evictions in
crowded court houses. Likewise, homeless people are more likely to have health
issues that make them more at risk for contracting the virus.
In addition, further analysis
of The Eviction Lab data by reporters at CNN shows that some of the
neighborhoods facing higher eviction rates are also facing higher rates of
medical comorbidities such as heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary
disease, diabetes and obesity, all of which are COVID-19 risk factors.
Even if a household manages to
pull together enough rent, coming close to eviction during a time when losing
shelter could lead to exposure to a deadly virus puts an enormous amount of
stress on an individual or family.
Evictions also cause
aftershocks in a community. In reference to the book “Evicted” by Matthew Desmond, one of the many minds behind Princeton’s
Eviction Lab data, Kreemer said, “In one part [Desmond] cites studies that
researched how communities are destroyed by evictions. A family lives on a
specific street, they are well known on that block, maybe their house is a
gathering space. They have to leave, and they can’t play an active role in that
community. Something immeasurable is lost.”
The eviction crisis is just one
side of a general breakdown of social life caused by the criminal response of
American ruling elite to the pandemic. As foodbanks across the country run low
on supplies and as the number of chronically unemployed hits an all-time high
and millions run out of federal and state jobless benefits, the US government
continues to do nothing to provide sufficient aid.
No comments:
Post a Comment