Consider This from NPR - Millions In Crisis As Coronavirus Relief Set To Expire At Years' End

Episode Date: December 1, 2020

Lawmakers have been deadlocked for months on another coronavirus relief package. Now millions of Americans who have relied on emergency spending programs during the pandemic are about to see their benefits expire at the end of the year — unless Congress and the White House can agree to a spending deal before the holidays. NPR correspondents Scott Horsley and Chris Arnold explain what could happen weeks from now if American workers, homeowners, renters and student loan borrowers lose key economic lifelines. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Annalise Monkman used to have a job at a hotel in Bangor, Maine. She booked and managed events there. Award dinners, corporate retreats, small trade shows. All of the football teams that play at our local large university would stay with us. And so we had to feed 100-person football teams for a weekend. Exactly the sort of gatherings that have all but disappeared in the pandemic. They didn't need me because I couldn't sell anyone anything and I couldn't manage any events because there weren't events to manage. And they had to cut costs pretty quickly.

Monkman was furloughed in March, lost her job in June. Her fiance was laid off from his job, too, at a local restaurant. They did OK at first. Pandemic legislation passed by Congress provided an extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits. But that ended in July. So now Monkman is scraping by on $355 a week. It's been tight. There have been bills we haven't paid. We try to keep things like car insurance, gas, and phone and internet because those things keep allowing us to look for jobs.

And even that reduced unemployment is set to end. It expires the day after Christmas. For Monkman and her fiance, that may mean giving up their home of a decade, the careers they've built, and moving into tight quarters with extended family. And yes, she knows for others, it will be even worse. But you're looking at families who are trying to teach their kids from home and feed them on very little money and then are not going to have things like heat. And here that could be, you know, life-threatening. Consider this.

Emergency programs have helped millions of Americans pay the bills and stay in their homes during the pandemic. And they're set to expire this month, just as the coronavirus is exploding. From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Tuesday, December 1st. This message comes from NPR sponsor BetterHelp, a truly affordable online counseling service. Fill out a questionnaire online and get matched with a licensed counselor best suited to your mental health needs. Whether it's depression, anxiety, or trauma, BetterHelp will help you overcome what stands in the way of your happiness.

Learn more at BetterHelp.com and get 10% off your first month with promo code CONSIDER. BetterHelp. Get help anytime, anywhere. Since the 1980s, hip-hop and America's prisons have grown side by side. And we're going to investigate this connection to see how it lifts us up and holds us down. Hip-hop is talking about what we live, trying to live the American dream, failing at the American dream. I'm Sydney Madden. I'm Rodney Carmichael. Listen now to the Louder Than a Riot podcast from NPR Music.

Where we trace the collision of rhyme and punishment in America. It's Consider This from NPR. Congress went big at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, passing four bills and roughly $3 trillion in emergency aid in the space of a couple of months. Since then, it's been more or less a stalemate. As the coronavirus continued to course through the country, parts of that legislation lapsed. The next big deadline comes the day after Christmas, when millions of people will lose emergency unemployment benefits unless Congress can pass new legislation.

Let me welcome all of you and thank you for being here. Just this week, some lawmakers came up with a plan to end the stalemate. This is emergency relief. Before the House and Senate adjourned for the holidays. It would be stupidity on steroids if Congress left for Christmas without doing an interim package. That was Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and before him, Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia. They're part of a group of lawmakers from the House and Senate with a new plan to spend $908 billion on emergency coronavirus relief.

They say it's less money than some Democrats want, but more than some Republicans want, and it would extend some extra federal unemployment benefits, provide funding for state and local governments, and authorize more money for the Paycheck Protection Program. It would not provide more cash payments to all Americans, something Democrats have pushed for. We've got people unemployed. We've got businesses shutting down. We've got states and localities getting ready for layoffs of large numbers of people. It's simply unacceptable for us not to respond to help in this circumstance. Republican Senator Mitt Romney put it this way. I happen to be a deficit hawk. I don't like borrowing money. I don't like spending

money we don't have. But the time to borrow money, maybe the only time to borrow money, is when there's a crisis. And this is a crisis. We want to help people at this particular time. Hours later, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he'd been talking with the White House about a relief package. I like to remind everybody that the way you get a result is you have to have a presidential signature. So I felt the first thing we needed to do was to find out what the president would in fact sign. The White House said that the bipartisan proposal had not been a topic of those discussions. Hanging in the balance are the millions of Americans who depend on that emergency unemployment assistance. NPR's Chris Arnold and Scott Horsley spoke to my colleague Mary

Louise Kelly about it. Let's start with the big picture. And Scott, I'm starting big because it feels really big. There are a lot of people affected by all this. There are. According to the Labor Department, more than 13 million people have been relying on emergency unemployment aid that is set to run out the day after Christmas. Now, that number may be a little bit inflated. Watchdog groups say that unemployment Laura Blue of Newtown, Connecticut, lost her job as a graphic designer for a cosmetics company. She's already exhausted her usual six months of state unemployment and shifted over to the emergency federal program. That's set to run out in just about four weeks. It's going to get more difficult to stay ahead of all my bills. My husband's salary can cover the mortgage and the utilities, but pretty much anything extra is my income. And just the loss of income over these last eight months, it's a bit stressful. When the Blues were getting the extra $600 a week during the summer,

they were doing okay, but their budget's a lot leaner now. Chris Arnold, let me bring you in. Speaking of bills coming due, you have been keeping an eye on the many people who are having trouble paying the rent, who are maybe facing eviction. What's the most important thing that's happening there? Well, there's a few things. And one, one of the biggest is these unemployment benefits that Scott was just talking about,

because so many people have absolutely exhausted their savings. They have nothing left. And these often meager unemployment benefits that are barely enough to pay the rent. And one person I talked to for a story stands out for me. His name's Todd Anderson. He lives in Northern Michigan, and he's a single dad with four kids. He's got five-year-old twins. And in the spring, he lost his landscaping job for resorts. He did stuff for big weddings and stuff. And all that shut down. And the unemployment money for him, too, has just not been enough.

It's like $350 a week. And that barely covers the rent. So he's been selling off his belongings to try to get by, some cabinets he had, a pair of hiking boots. And I sold tools, tools of my trade. I sold hoping that I can rebuy them as I get on my feet. And to save money, he and his kids actually were living in this tiny cabin in the woods where it was like 200 square feet. They didn't have room for a table to eat at or any furniture besides a couple of beds. But with winter coming, that wasn't going to work.

So he borrowed a little bit of money from family to get a security deposit together so he and his kids could move into an actual house. I sat down the first night after we moved in, and they watched me cry because we could sit around a table, and we didn't do that for six months. So to be able to have dinner together. As a dad, that's kind of important to me. So we just try to muscle through, and I try not to tell him that we're broke. But as we said, the unemployment money barely covers the rent.

And in his case, our story about him aired. There's a little bright spot here. A lot of people reached out to him to offer to help. And a strange relative said, hey, I'll help pay your rent. But most people do not end up on the national news. And again, without those unemployment benefits, a lot of people will not be able to pay rent and they're going to slide into eviction. Chris, stay with the eviction question for a sec, because there is this order from the CDC,

the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has been preventing evictions, trying to help renters. That is also expiring at the end of the year. Yes, that is set to expire. Housing groups are calling on the CDC to extend that. We'll see. But that is also problematic. I mean, there are thousands of people being evicted even with that order because it's not like a blanket moratorium that some states have put into effect where it's like nobody can be evicted. This is different. Renters have to know about it. They have to go to the CDC website often, print it out, give it to their landlord. And a lot of people don't even show up in court for eviction hearings. So it's problematic, but it is protecting a lot of other people who do manage to take advantage of it.

I did a story where I talked to Jeremy and Alice Bumpus, and they've been facing eviction in Houston after losing their jobs. We got 13, 12, and a 10-year-old in the house. My mom is 68. And that's what we worry about the most, you know, how much more we're going to be at risk when we have to move up out of our home. My mother-in-law is very sickly. They, the couple got a legal aid lawyer. So they're using the CDC order that's keeping them at least until it expires, keeping them in the house. I talked to Christina Rosales, though, she's with a prominent nonprofit named Texas Housers.

And she says, look, the courts in Texas and other states, they're holding eviction hearings over Zoom calls and just chugging along, continuing to evict people during the pandemic. It's lunacy. It is absolute lunacy to see the pandemic numbers in Texas just rising, the infection rates, the death rates, the hospitalizations. Judges are continuing to hold hearings,

and people are very scared about losing their home, being thrown out into the streets. So what Congress needs to do is to act now. And all kinds of housing groups and some mainstream economists, too, we should say, are calling for a couple of things. One is a real nationwide eviction moratorium that is just a blanket thing that works for everybody. And money for landlords, importantly, too, so that the rent gets paid, the back rent gets paid, and the landlords don't go under either. So many people facing so many struggles. Scott Horsley, is help on the way? That compromise bill we mentioned that lawmakers are cooking up, what are its prospects? You know, it's hard to say. It was designed to bridge this big gulf between House Democrats who wanted a really big aid package and Senate Republicans who've been pushing for a much narrower relief bill. But it's not clear whether it's going to get any traction. And that's really frustrating for April Kinzinger, who lives near Dayton, Ohio. She's been scraping by on $189 a week and is

about to lose even that lifeline. I think normal people sitting here watching the television screen are pretty sick and tired of seeing both sides fighting over kind of arbitrary things when we're unable to make our car payments, when we're unable to put food on the table. It seems a lot like they're fighting over political stuff when we just need to be able to feed our kids. One more question to you, Chris. We've been talking about renters and the prospect of eviction. What about homeowners? Are they in trouble at the end of this year too? You know, not nearly as much as renters. There is a foreclosure moratorium that's expiring at the federal level,

but there are such good protections for homeowners that stave people off, you know, protect them from even getting to the foreclosure stage. And so there's a big push to see better protections for renters, too, if Congress can pass another relief bill. NPR's Chris Arnold and Scott Horsley talking to Mary Louise Kelly. One more troubling note. This one is about evictions. A new paper looks at what happened when state-level eviction moratoriums expired. It found that in states where bans were lifted, evictions may have led to hundreds of thousands of coronavirus cases

and more than 10,000 deaths. It's surprising and it's troubling. And these are deaths that, you know, could have been prevented had the states maintained their moratoriums. Katherine Leifheit of UCLA was the lead author of the study. It's not yet been peer-reviewed, but she says she hopes it can convince local and federal lawmakers to extend eviction protections. You know, it's difficult to socially distance and shelter in place if you don't have a shelter.

You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Cornish.