From Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta:
An eviction marks a crisis point of housing instability that ripples into nearly every facet of a person’s life and harms future chances of housing security. Struggling tenants, advocates, researchers, and policymakers were already familiar with the harms of eviction well before the COVID-19 pandemic brought widespread economic distress to renter households. With the added urgency of a global pandemic, the impacts of eviction mushroom and tighten the nexus between individual outcomes like an eviction and community-level harm.
To combat the devastating, nationwide public health impact that mass evictions could have on the spread of COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a broad eviction moratorium in September 2020, which is scheduled to expire on June 30, 2021. The moratorium prohibits landlords from evicting “any covered person from any residential property in any state or U.S. territory in which there are documented cases of COVID-19.” A “covered person” includes people who cannot afford to pay their rent due to a COVID-19-related economic hardship. Although the CDC moratorium appears to provide a tool for the broad prevention of eviction, not all tenants are aware of its protections. Its implementation has resulted in a rash of legal challenges and a nationwide patchwork of practices that differ by county and sometimes by judge.
Despite the nationwide eviction moratorium, landlords have continued to file eviction cases. These filings are a signal that potential troubles from eviction still loom, and their volumes and distribution offer one measure of how exposed local areas and neighborhoods remain to eviction issues.
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