The pandemic has destabilized the world’s social and economic foundation, and housing has been no exception.
Thirty percent of renters in the United States were unable to pay their January rent on time, according to a national survey done by the Apartment List.
Rob Warnock, a research associate at Apartment List, said the survey also found that 28 percent of renters were coming into 2021 with unpaid bills, creating further financial strain.
“Something that we were tracking a lot last year was whether or not people were having difficulty making their rent payments,” Warnock said in an interview. “It became a very tangible way in which the pandemic was making it difficult for renters to thrive economically.”
The study highlighted racial disparities among renters, with Black residents having more than two times the rate of rent debt than their white counterparts.
“We see enough signals that rent debt is correlated with socioeconomic factors,” Warnock said.
The housing crisis has been a persistent problem in Boston as well — even before the pandemic — where the last decade saw nearly 15 evictions per day, according to a joint study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the non-profit City Life/Vida Urbana organization.
The study also found 78 percent of evictions filed in Boston during the pandemic were in areas where people of color make up the majority of residents.
While the Apartment List survey found that national rent debt has improved slightly from October 2020, the percentage of Black renters with rent debt increased from six percent to 53. Debt dropped for Hispanic, white and Asian renters, the study found.
Katherine Einstein, an associate political science professor in Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences, said rent debt and the threat of eviction is another example of existing inequalities being worsened for Black and Latinx Americans.
“When we think about the context of this global pandemic, all of these forces seem to be really hitting those communities to a much greater degree,” she said, “and we have to worry about it exacerbating already existing economic inequalities and reinforcing systemic racism.”
Einstein said some states passed moratoriums to protect residents from eviction during the pandemic.
Massachusetts’ eviction moratorium expired on Oct. 17, 2020. However, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention moratorium on residential evictions is now in effect nationwide until March 31, protecting qualified residential tenants from being evicted if they submit a form.
Before the CDC moratorium was extended, Massachusetts issued a “COVID-19 Eviction Diversion Initiative” to support tenants as well as landlords during the pandemic.
While these pauses on evictions have helped protect residents temporarily, Warnock said the long-term issue of rent debt and evictions has yet to be addressed.
“They fall short of solving the problem in that they don’t eliminate the debt, they don’t give people an ability to suddenly pay their debt,” he said. “The rent debt still exists.”
He said residents remain vulnerable to evictions after the moratoriums expire.
“At a certain point, the debt itself needs to be addressed,” Warnock said.
Einstein said these moratoriums have made a large impact in protecting against further spread of COVID-19.
“We’ve identified eviction moratoriums as this really important public health tool, and one that may have saved 10s of 1000s of lives in the United States,” Warnock said, “and could have saved many more had it been implemented in a more timely fashion … across the country last spring.”
Einstein added that some cities have implemented rent relief programs to deal with the issue of rent debt, but they have not been entirely effective.
“Even in those places where they have actually gone and implemented rent relief programs, they’ve been sort of woefully inadequate to the task at hand,” Einstein said, “and that’s because cities are so budget constrained, they just don’t have the money to support these renters.”
Warnock said cities are likely to create compromises with landlords using rent relief aid to help erase debt.
“That’s kind of where we are today and where I expect a lot of the legislation to go forward over the next year,” Warnock said. “That hasn’t really started in earnest yet, but it will continue a lot through 2021.”
