The surge of eviction - The end of the anti-eviction bill

 Aiden  Cunningham

Mr. Roddy
IHSS
7 April 2021

The surge of eviction

Before covid, tenants could be evicted by their landlords for any failure to pay their bills, and while some landlords were more lenient with this rule than others, it was a major problem for tenants living paycheck to paycheck. Especially in California, where tenants could be evicted just for failure to pay rent 3-4 days after receiving a notice, and tenants were expected to leave the building once evicted within four to six weeks. This meant that if there was an unexpected medical expense or a loss of work, tenants would essentially be greeted with an eviction notice.

With the current pandemic that has taken over America, more people are losing their jobs and incurring medical expenses than ever, and that became a problem. To combat this, an order was released that basically says that tenants can not be evicted for any unexpected medical expense or job loss. Now, as you could imagine, this was huge for people who were barely hanging on to their jobs during the pandemic. Tenants could still be sued if they were abusing this law, but they were overall safe from being kicked out.

Most people would say “wow, this is great”, but landlords, most of which rely on rent to pay their own bills, weren’t happy with this. This meant that they needed to get by on even less money than before because they could not evict non-paying tenants to make room for ones who could pay. This created a dilemma that eventually just settled down in having the tenants that experienced a job loss or medical expense to pay as much as they could, and the landowners would have to wait for the end date of the law, January 31, 2021.

The bill was extended to March by President Biden, and this took some stress off the shoulders of the homeowners who were still struggling to pay their bills, but March has come and passed as of recently, and the bill has been ended. Contrary to what you might think, there is not a surge of homeowners being evicted from their houses. It is said that it was agreed on to slowly evict homeowners, starting with the ones who are paying the least, as to not disrupt the economy with a flood of now homeless people in the streets. Not only would this potentially harm the economy, but it would also greatly increase the spread of covid. I agree, the best decision would be to keep this rule in place, but landlords need to pay their bills too, and water and electricity companies depend on their money to keep their plants running.

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