Today, Explained - #CancelRent

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

Eviction bans and expanded unemployment benefits are expiring, leaving millions of Americans at risk of losing their homes by the end of the summer. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos from and I'm joined by Today Explained reporter producer Halima Shah because the rent is still too damn high.

Halima. The rent is too damn high. And what's happening right now is that the rent might not be paid. At least a quarter of U.S. workers are unemployed or underemployed because of the pandemic. And it's not clear when they're going to go back to work. So a lot of them are going to tell you that they're waiting for the government to do something so they can keep a roof over their heads. And what's the government going to do besides those, you know, one-time $1,200 checks? Well, that check was paid for by the CARES Act. And another major provision of it was boosted unemployment insurance. It provides people with an extra $600 a week on top of the

unemployment insurance that they're getting from the state. But all of that is going to expire on July 31st. And if the government doesn't take action, there will probably be an avalanche of evictions by the end of the summer. Estimates say somewhere around 20 million renters will not have a home. And tenants are starting to organize, fight back, and call for rent cancellation. Cancellation? Cancellation. They want landlords to give them a break for a couple of months, and they want the government to pass some kind of legislation that's going to provide relief that lasts past the summer. And you've been following this story,

and you actually went to some sort of like rent protest, right? Yeah, I went to a tenant rally in D.C. a few weeks back, which, by the way, was a car rally because of the virus. So people were circling the block around the Capitol. Cars were bumper to bumper and had effectively blocked traffic. This was where I met a guy named Sammy Borma. He's really hard to miss because every inch of his car was covered in rent cancellation signs. He was also blasting this song that he called Ms. Mar. Ms. Mar is about action and kind of like, you know, to give you energy. Until the pandemic, Sammy had three jobs. I work at NIH as a cook and I work with the union Local 23 as an organizer.

And he was an Uber driver. But he was furloughed from his cooking job, laid off at the union, and stopped driving Uber to limit his exposure. So now, he's here. Right now, tenants struggling to make rent are relying on a patchwork of government programs. Since COVID-19, there have been some limited protections put into place for renters to prevent evictions.

This is Diane Yentel. She's president and CEO of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition. Basically, there's a federal eviction moratorium that covers people who live in federally funded housing. And then there are some state and local moratoriums too. But Diane says that only covers about 30% of renters. There are many renters who are left unprotected. Sammy and his family are among those who are unprotected. He lives just outside D.C. in Alexandria, Virginia. Virginia had an eviction moratorium because of COVID, but it expired late last month. Low-income renters like Sammy are relying on the one-time stimulus check

and expanded unemployment insurance. But that all goes away on July 31st. We can say with certainty that if there is not a significant federal intervention, that there will be a wave of evictions and a spike in homelessness across the country. And in fact, in many ways, that wave has already begun, and we need to work now to prevent it from becoming a tsunami. And we're running out of time. Late last month, I went to the five-building complex where Sami lives. His building is home to a lot of immigrants

working in the service industry. Hello. How are you? Good. Hands at the back. Sami shares a one-bedroom apartment with his wife. My name is Layla Mohammadi. His daughter, Disha.

I'm 11 years old, and I'm going to sixth grade. And his 10-month-old son, Jawad. Their home is about 550 square feet. It's hard to believe that the family spends all of their time here during the pandemic, because it is spotless. Shoes come off at the front door. Each room is a kind of multipurpose space. The bedroom doubles as a nursery.

The combined living and dining room has a couch and TV in one corner and a baby's playpen in the other. In the middle is open space and a tapestry of the gaba. This apartment is the first place that Sammy and his family have shared together. It's because he immigrated to the U.S. alone in the 1990s. Sammy was born in Sudan and grew up in Saudi Arabia. For most of his marriage, his wife and child stayed in Saudi Arabia and he sent money home. But two years ago, they joined him in Virginia and started making a life together.

His daughter, Disha, even enrolled in the local elementary school. Coming from back home two years ago, she didn't speak English at that time. And during that short time, she'd be able to catch up with the language. Her grade really is like she got 100% last year and this year. So it makes me so happy. She proves herself she's a good child when it comes to the school. Deja graduated from elementary school this year. Sammy wanted to throw her a party, but the virus made that difficult. So he got creative. I cannot afford the stuff I want to

do for her. So I just go to the dollar store and decorate the apartment. I find a phone at a good price. It's a used phone, but it's in a good condition. So I put it in a gift box. She opened it. She was so happy, screaming and jumping. The apartment is still decorated in the red streamers from her party. But it's hard to stay celebratory under the circumstances. Sammy says he's drained his savings. He's got about $3,000 a month of unemployment insurance, a chunk of which is going away at the end of July. And his usual expenses add up to about $2,500 a month.

That's not including things like food, clothes, or diapers. And then I have a credit card that I've been paying, like, you know, at least $50 a month. Sammy has a lot of neighbors in the same boat. So in April, they went on strike. No more rent until the jobs come back. So we put that in the letter, and then we start sending it to people in a text message to spread around. So by the second week, we have over 300 people signed a demand letter. The apartment's management company, Bell Partners, said they have taken steps to ease the financial burden that COVID-19 brought.

In a written statement, they said, From April through June, we offered the chance to enroll in a payment plan to any resident experiencing financial difficulty due to COVID-19. We also extended due dates for rent and waived late payments and credit card fees. We have attempted to reach every resident by email, phone, and hand-delivered notice prior to taking any further action. Sammy is one of the residents who the apartment complex contacted. They're taking steps to evict him.

Are you worried about eviction? Being honest with you, yes. Even last night, I was there awake until 3 o'clock in the morning. This week, Sammy will go to court. And he'll find out if he can get an extension to stay in his apartment longer. After the break, Sammy gets an answer, and Congress tries to save Americans from losing their homes. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Thank you. Finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions

and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-p.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. All right, Halima, so we're going to hear about Sammy's decision. But before we do that, we're going to talk about whether anything's going to be done to save him and the millions of Americans who are in a similar situation, right? Yeah. COVID-19 has brought on economic hardship that has left renters like Sammy really worried about eviction. But experts will tell you that this housing crisis was a long time coming. Here's Diane Yantel from the National Low-Income Housing Coalition. Even before COVID-19

came to our country, you know, we were in the midst of a severe affordable housing crisis. We had a shortage of 7 million homes affordable and available for the lowest income renters. A Harvard study found that about a quarter of U.S. renters spend more than half of their income on housing, which means that after paying rent, there's not much money left to spend on things that their families need. And that data is from 2018, long before the recent economic downturn. So for low-income families, rent is likely an even bigger burden today. So when you have such limited income to begin with, you're always one financial emergency away from not being able to pay the rent

and potentially facing eviction and, in worst cases, homelessness. So for many of these households, coronavirus is that financial emergency. And decades of inequities make those emergencies worse. Structural racism that leaves people of color disproportionately low income, disproportionately rent burdened, disproportionately likely to be homeless. On top of that, we have a relatively new problem of a shortage of affordable housing. Homelessness as it exists today, where you see people sleeping in encampments and in cars and in RVs and showering at the local Y in order to get ready to go to work or to school the next day, that didn't always exist in our country. And if we went back to the late 1970s, we'd find a time both when we had a small surplus of homes affordable for lowest income people, and we had none of the pervasive homelessness that exists in our country today. And the main difference between then and now is the level of funding going towards solutions

to keep people affordably housed. Fair housing for all, all human beings who live in this country is now a part of the American way of life. In the 60s, when the Fair Housing Act was signed, the Johnson administration funded subsidized housing on a national scale. But that only lasted a few years. I, Richard Nixon, do solemnly swear... When President Nixon was re-elected, his administration stopped building public housing.

The federal budget is out of control, and we face runaway deficits of almost 80 million dollars per year. And the Reagan administration made drastic cuts to rental assistance programs. Today, Black and Brown renters are bearing the brunt of the housing crisis. The racial wealth gap today is as wide as it was in 1968. And COVID-19 is the straw that is breaking the camel's back. Health officials have preached that COVID-19 doesn't discriminate. But in Chicago, most of the people who've gotten sick or died are people of color.

The reports are startling in North Carolina, Connecticut, and Michigan, too. Congress knows about the circumstances of people like Sammy. There are a few efforts moving forward right now that could help people with housing. Washington State Congressman Denny Heck introduced a bill that passed the House this summer. We introduced the Emergency Rental Assistance Act, providing $100 billion to provide rent relief to those who are particularly stressed by the current situation. It provides billions to help homeowners with their mortgages, too. And it extends the eviction moratorium on federally funded housing. What it doesn't do is cancel the rent or create a blanket ban on evictions for all renters. Heck says that extending eviction moratoriums alone will pass expenses off to others,

like mom-and-pop landlords. A family that decides instead of building a 401k for their retirement, they're going to buy duplexes. That's their retirement program. They have mortgages on those duplexes. And if we grant an eviction moratorium, all that does is transfer the problem to this couple who has got their retirement nest egg in the form of these duplexes, for example, that the bill comes due on. And then they get foreclosed on. Denny Heck's bill was wrapped into the HEROES Act, a second proposed coronavirus relief package that

was passed by Democrats in the House. But the bill doesn't have much of a shot in the Republican-led Senate. I think there are some Senate Republicans that are beginning to understand the nature of the need here. Whether or not we can get them there by the end of the month or the first part of August remains to be seen. Republicans might support a second relief package, but it's unclear if their version would target evictions. On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said, Kids in school, jobs, and health care are likely to be the focus of the bill I'll be laying out probably next week. Diane said that even if rental relief does pass, it's a short-term fix.

She says to get out of a decades-long housing crisis, we have to think much bigger. Those solutions include long-term rental assistance for the lowest-income renters. We also need to be building more apartments, and we need to make sure that those apartments are affordable to the people who need it the most. And then we also need cash assistance that's available to low-income renters who can generally make ends meet, but have an unexpected financial crisis and need some cash. In the meantime, Sammy's rent strike continues, and the threat of eviction looms. I don't have no brother, no cousin, no uncle, no nephew, nobody.

It's just about myself. And the same thing with my wife. She doesn't have nobody. You know, just only me and her. That's one of the things that goes on in my mind a lot. If anything happens to me, what are they going to do? Where are we going to go? Sammy's apartment is a source of shelter,

as much as it is a milestone of the family's first apartment together. The first holiday was Ramadan. It was awesome to have that celebration with my family in this apartment. Because kind of like the first Ramadan, me and them, ourselves in this apartment. Do you feel like you've gotten closer to your family during this time? Yeah, a lot. A lot. Because we've been married for almost 11 years now. But in that 11 years, only two years we've been together consistently all through the year.

Normally they're in Saudi Arabia, and every year I take a vacation and go see them and come back. He even floated the idea of his wife and kids going back to Saudi Arabia amid all of the financial hardship. But after going through a pandemic together and getting so close, the old arrangement is hard to imagine. Even now, if I ask them, you know, it's like, oh, you want to go back? It's like, no, not right now. Not right now. Yesterday, Sammy and dozens of tenants from his building went to court after their apartment complex initiated eviction proceedings. Based on what he's heard from other tenants, Sammy said one of two things is likely to happen. He'll either get an extension to stay in his home for two more months, or the court sides with the apartment complex and he gets evicted.

When I FaceTimed Sammy just before his hearing, local unions were rallying in front of the courthouse. Hi, Sammy, can you hear me? Yes. It's the big day. How are you feeling? Nervous. If that extension didn't happen. I don't know. For real, I don't know. I'm going to start selling my clothes, my stuff at home. I try to keep it positive. Sammy said that if he buys himself more time, it'll be used to work something out with the landlord or keep organizing with other tenants. When I called him back after his hearing to get the final results, this is what he said. Hello. You sound happy. Did you get good news? The judge, when he called my name, he was smiling.

He said, you savvy boy. I said, yes. Straight up, he said, I give you a 60-day extension until September the 16th at 1.30. So that 60 days, basically, it gives us a window to have more time to continue organizing for that ring cancellation campaign. What are you going to do now? I found out that across the street, people, they received that letter for hearings. So we're trying to focus on the governor's capability to stop eviction in Virginia. So we're going to focus a little bit on the governor. Sammy said the first thing he's going to do when he gets home

is tell his wife their good news. After that, he's going straight back to organizing. Halima Shah. She's a reporter and a producer here at Today Explained. We reached out to Senate Republicans on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee to ask if they'd support rent relief, but they didn't respond in time for publishing. Bye.