Biden administration seeks to blunt impact from end of eviction moratorium

Washington

WITH the federal moratorium on evictions having expired over the weekend, the White House on Monday sought to limit the effect, demanding that states speed up disbursement of billions of dollars in bottled-up rental aid while pleading with local governments to enact their own extensions.

President Joe Biden - under fire from the left of his party for not extending the freeze and eager to prove he was taking action to prevent evictions - directed federal agencies to consider targeted extensions for tenants in federally subsidised housing, asked state judges to slow-walk eviction proceedings and called for a review of problems that have slowed the flow of aid.

The temporary ban on evictions, imposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last fall, lapsed Saturday after a frenzied, failed effort on Capitol Hill to extend it through the end of the year, putting hundreds of thousands of tenants at risk of losing shelter.

It will take weeks for new eviction cases to work their way through state courts. But some legal aid groups and tenants organisations are already reporting a steep rise in phone calls and e-mails from renters who owe money to landlords and lost the protection of the federal moratorium at midnight on Saturday.

Landlords have long argued that eviction moratoriums violate their property rights, and deny them their most effective mechanism for dealing with problematic tenants.

On Monday, administration officials made it clear they could only do so much at this point, blaming sluggish implementation at the state level for the fact that the US$47 billion Emergency Rental Assistance program has disbursed only US$3 billion - just 7 per cent of the total.

The pace of aid reaching tenants has increased significantly in recent months, with US$1.5 billion being disbursed to 290,000 households in June.

"We expect these numbers to grow, but it will not be enough to meet the need, unless every state and locality accelerates funds to tenants," Gene Sperling, who is overseeing pandemic relief for Mr Biden, told reporters at the White House.

Sperling also pressed for the extension of existing local moratoriums, saying that one-third of renters are already protected by state and city governments. NYTIMES