Consider This from NPR - Banning Evictions Should Help The Economy. But Can The CDC Do That?

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, told NPR today that keeping people in their houses and 'connected to the economy' will cost money now, but pay dividends later. But the White House and Congress have been unable to agree on a deal for additional economic relief, millions of people are still unemployed, and many states now have no eviction protection. The Trump administration issued an eviction ban through the CDC this week. NPR's Chris Arnold and Selena Simmons-Duffin reported on the CDC's temporary halt on evictions and the legal issues that will likely follow. Find and support your local public radio station.Email us at [e-mail] Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Back in July, we told you about a woman named Emily Gwill. Back then, she told NPR that she had lost her job at a hotel in Portland, Oregon, and that she was going through her savings with no plan for what to do if they ran out. I'm concerned about going into deep debt and ruining my credit. I'm worried about not being able to pay my rent and having, maybe facing eviction or breaking my lease. She was saying all that in mid-July. Well, actually, there've been some big changes. And now? My savings was gone and I was sort of staring down the barrel of rent due on September

1st. I decided to break my lease and move out of state back in with my parents. Emily Gwill is 38 years old. She says she didn't have a choice but to move back home because the money she'd been living on, 600 bucks a week from the federal government, went away. I just gave away everything I owned and still looking for a job and getting nothing in response, trying to change industries when, you know, millions of people are looking for a job. It's very overwhelming. And I'm not really sure what the future holds. Alicia Gonzalez in Arizona was also unemployed back in July. I thought things couldn't get worse. It's just, it's just getting worse. Then she got an offer for a job as a Walmart greeter, enforcing the company's mask mandate at the door.

And I'm like, that's really like a close and personal, like people can be like, you know, like, no, I don't, I didn't feel safe enough. So she turned down the job. Then there's Kim Robinson in New Orleans. She hasn't been able to find work the last few months. She says she's hoping Congress and the White House will agree to start sending money to people again. With everything going on in America, they could at least help the American people because we are the economy, you know? Coming up with millions of people still unemployed, the CDC is getting involved in stopping evictions. And one of the country's top economic officials says it's better for the economy to help people stay in their homes.

This is Consider This from NPR. So there's this law from 1944 called the Public Health Service Act. Basically, it gives the CDC certain powers to prevent disease from spreading, particularly from state to state, the law says. It lists different examples such as inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, so the destruction of animals. That's Erin Fusay-Brown of Georgia State University. And what the law doesn't say is anything about housing or evictions. But that's exactly what the Trump administration is trying

to use it for. We've got some breaking news on the eviction moratorium. Diana Olick's got the details. Diana. The administration issued an order this week that takes effect today to stop evictions nationwide for some people. But it's interesting how they're able to do this through an executive order. They're actually using an order from the CDC, which is saying that it is no longer healthy to evict anyone from a residential property. The legal justification for this is that 1944 law, the administration says evictions could lead to more spread of the coronavirus. If you can take steps to prevent animals or other types of, you know, fleas from spreading infectious disease, then could you also take some steps to prevent people from being

forced to crowd? So with evictions on the rise and Congress and the White House so far unable to agree on any more economic relief, this is where the federal response has landed. But the thing about the CDC's order is that it's definitely going to face challenges in the courts. Those decisions either way, whether they uphold it or strike it down, are going to have really big implications for the federal role in the pandemic response going forward. Law professor Lindsay Wiley of American University says one of those implications could be this. If you get a decision upholding this order, that could embolden a future Biden administration to issue a national mask mandate.

Or if a judge strikes the order down, the federal government and whoever's in the White House might have less power to take steps that could keep the virus from spreading. Still, this order does have evictions on pause in a lot of places, while people figure out what exactly it means. Heather Panizzo didn't even know about the order until she heard about it from one of our reporters this week. Oh, oh, wow. Oh, my God, that is awesome. Heather is disabled. She lives in Houston with her four-year-old son. Her partner lost his job in the pandemic. She got behind on rent and her landlord filed to evict her. So she was pretty relieved to hear about the CDC order.

There's just been so much stuff on stuff on stuff. I feel like it's piling on top of me. And honestly, I don't know. It just feels like somebody got like all these big boulders and just lifted them up. And took some of the pressure off, you know. Thing is, that feeling of relief is probably temporary. Even if this order is upheld in court, it doesn't mean rent is canceled. Any payments missed would have to be paid back in January.

And it's not like there's federal money to go with the order to help renters or landlords. You can find out more on the CDC's order from NPR's Selena Simmons-Duffin and Chris Arnold in our episode notes. So the CDC says evicting people is not good for public health. And the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, says, To the extent you can keep people in the workforce, keep them in their houses, they're going to be able to contribute more to the economy. It'll cost money now, but it will pay dividends later. Powell talked to NPR today from his office in Washington, D.C. The same day a new government report showed that the unemployment rate dropped a little,

from more than 10 percent in July to 8.4 percent in August. Of course, when Federal Reserve chairs speak, what they say can affect markets, so they usually speak carefully. NPR's chief economic correspondent, Scott Horsley, helped us read between the lines of what Powell said. He talked to my colleague, Sasha Pfeiffer. Would you give us your overall assessment of this report? It's certainly positive that U.S. employers added 1.4 million jobs in August, but that is fewer jobs than were added in July, and July's gains were smaller than June. So there does seem to be some loss of momentum here. The August numbers were also boosted in part by some 238,000 temporary workers who were

hired to help complete the 2020 census. Without them, job growth would have been just 1.1 million last month. We did see gains in restaurants and retail shops, two sectors that were really hard hit by the pandemic early on and are slowly crawling back. There was one other bit of color in today's report. Almost one out of four people who had a job last month was working from home because of the coronavirus. And that number was down just ever so slightly from the month before. Oh, that's interesting. What is Powell's take on the job situation and how the economy is faring? He was pretty positive. He has been watching for a slowdown because the spike in infections

we had this summer, especially in the South and West. And of course, we saw the end of that supplemental unemployment payment at the end of July. Both of those really could have taken the air out of the recovery, but Powell says they don't seem to have done so, at least not yet. There may be a modest slowing in the pace of improvement, but improvement goes on. And in the labor market, I would say it goes on, you know, at least at the pace that we've expected. You know, when the Fed made its last forecast in the early part of the summer, they were predicting unemployment would be 9.3% at the end of this year. So the drop to 8.4% in August is better than a lot of people were expecting. But what about the people who've been totally left behind in the economy? Unemployed people with no savings, people facing eviction.

Did Powell address what could be done for them? It's certainly a concern because it may very well be that the easy jobs to recover have already been recovered. The low-hanging fruit has now been picked. And Powell has been saying for some time that there are parts of the economy that will take a long time to recover. So some people may be out of work for a long time.

The Fed chairman left it to Congress to figure out the details, but he did suggest that another round of relief measures may be necessary. We shouldn't let those people lose everything they have and have to move out or be evicted and move in with family. That's also not going to be good for containing the COVID spread. So I do think we ought to do everything we can as a country to keep those people, I won't say make them whole, but I would say to look out for them. All right, Scott, so this is still not a fast track economic recovery, not that quicker shaped, V-shaped recovery that's preferable to the slower U-shaped recovery we often hear about.

Anything else Powell says needs to be done or could be done? Well, ultimately, the Fed has said that the future of the economy depends on the path of the pandemic. But the Fed chairman did offer his own sort of public health advisory this afternoon. To get us back to full employment, we're going to need to get the spread of the disease under control. And the best way to do that, short of arriving at a vaccine, is to take these social distancing measures and employ them. And that means masks, that means keeping your distance, and things like that. Those things actually enable people to go back to work and not get sick. The chairman did take his own mask off

long enough for the interview, but he did have it ready. NPR's chief economics correspondent, Scott Horsley, talking to my colleague, Sasha Pfeiffer. Jerome Powell talked to NPR's Steve Inskeep, and there is more from their conversation. You can hear it on Monday on NPR's Morning Edition. This is Consider This from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. If an elephant feels threatened, watch out. Elephants have picked up people and literally hurled them across the floor and just broken them. If an elephant feels threatened, watch out. Elephants have picked up people and literally hurled them across the floor and just broken them. How can these two species live together in peace?

New ways of resolving conflict. That's on the TED Radio Hour from NPR.