People
who have been evicted are statistically more likely to face ongoing housing
instability and have worse health outcomes than those that have stable living
situations.
Kat Eschner July 15, 2020
More than
half of the state-level eviction moratoriums put in place in response to
current pandemic have lifted, and the federal moratorium will lift later this
month.Unsplash
In the wake of the
coronavirus pandemic, America is facing a crisis that could see more than
twenty million people become homeless in just a few months. Those who study
eviction say this unprecedented event will have devastating public health
consequences—particularly as it unfolds in the midst of another national
hardship.
“The United States is
facing an eviction crisis of proportions that we have never seen in our
history,” says Emily Benfer, a law professor at Wake Forest University. Benfer
has spent her career studying eviction, and says a full federal moratorium
coupled with rent and mortgage subsidies is necessary to thwart this
devastating event, whose effects could be felt long after the pandemic has
ended.
Studying eviction at a
national scale has historically been difficult, because housing data isn’t
collected and distributed by any federal agency. However, researchers have been
able to track some stats—particularly in the past few years, when Princeton
University’s Eviction
Lab put together the first national database on the topic that
scholars have been able to study and use.
“Eviction is not just about
putting people on the streets. Eviction also always leads to a downward move,”
Benfer says. People who have been evicted are statistically more likely to face
ongoing housing instability and have worse health outcomes across the board
than those that have stable living situations. Like every financially negative
aspect of American life, this burden is disproportionately born by people of
color: in this case, specifically Black and Latinx communities.
When the pandemic began, a
number of states issued moratoriums on evictions, and in April the federal
government put in place one such ban pertaining to federally
financed properties, which represents 28 percent of renters nationwide. More
than half of the state-level eviction moratoriums have lifted, and the federal
moratorium will lift later this month. But the national financial situation has
gotten worse since the moratoriums went into place, not better.
Between 2000 and 2016, data
from the Eviction Lab shows that there were 61 million total eviction filings.
If nothing is done to prevent evictions now and in the next few months, the
Aspen Institute predicts more than 20 million evictions between now
and September 30.
Experts say that the public
health ramifications will be equally staggering. Even in the absence of a
pandemic, eviction is the beginning of a downward socio-economic slide that
results in worse health outcomes, Benfer says.
“We can expect to see a
second-wave public health crisis in the form of the comorbidities related to
eviction,” she says. Research has demonstrated that people who experience
eviction are likely to experience chronic disease, die younger, face ongoing
instability that worsens these conditions, and even experience what is known as
a “death of despair”: a drug or alcohol overdose or suicide is more likely to
be their cause of death.
“One of the populations
that it affects the most traumatically is children,” says Benfer. Kids with
underlying health conditions, like asthma (which impacts Black and Latinx
children at a rate of 2 to 1 in relation to white children) are likely to see
their conditions worsen. Further, the simple fact of losing a home and the
safety it provides is devastating to a child’s development. Eviction counts as
what’s termed an “adverse childhood experience,” which the CDC notes will “have a tremendous impact on future
violence victimization and perpetration, and lifelong health and opportunity.”
Add in a pandemic and
outcomes for those evicted look even worse, regardless of whether or not
someone who is evicted contracts the disease. “As far as health outcomes go,
everything is worse in the face of this pandemic,” says David Bradford, a
health economist at the University of Georgia. Social support and medical
systems are already under extreme stress, as are most individuals, he says.
Then of course there is the
virus. Eviction during a pandemic will result in more people getting COVID-19,
says Corey Hazekamp, a fourth-year medical student at the University of
Illinois at Chicago who studies eviction. Some people who are evicted will
become homeless, which opens them up to a whole new set of vulnerabilities.
Others will crowd in with family or friends in what are likely to be small
spaces, which makes them more likely to catch COVID-19 or to spread it.
“If you have to make a
decision between putting a roof over your kid’s head or social distancing by
sleeping in the park, you’re going to stay
Lawmakers have been
thinking about this crisis. Several pieces of legislation, most notably
the HEROES Act and the Emergency Housing Protections and Relief Act of 2020,
planned to combat evictions in the short term using a federal moratorium and
subsidies to stabilize the real estate market. They made it through the House
and are currently stalled in the Senate.
Given the profound impacts
of eviction, longer-term solutions will also be necessary, Hazekamp says.
Eviction is “a major structural issue ingrained in our society, unfortunately.”
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