Illustration by Victoria Borges
Housing advocates say the end of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium on July 31 puts tens of thousands of people in the Richmond region at risk of homelessness.
The moratorium, which delays eviction proceedings for those struggling financially because of COVID-19, has been in effect since Sept. 4 of last year.
While it’s not clear how many people may be evicted, statewide data on the Virginia Rent Relief Program (RRP) shows that payments from June 2020 to May 2021 totaled more than $195 million, with 41,744 payments processed to 34,914 households statewide. This figure does not include Chesterfield County, which opted to administer its own rent relief programs.
Christie Marra, director of housing advocacy at the Virginia Poverty Law Center (VPLC), is concerned that landlords also will no longer be required to provide tenants with information about how to apply for rental assistance, nor will they be obligated to apply for rental assistance on behalf of their tenants.
To access the current RRP funds, which come from the federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program, renters must present documentation affirming that they have lost income or had increased medical expenses because of COVID-19 and, as a result, they cannot pay their rent. “If they give that form to their landlord, the landlord cannot physically evict them,” Marra says.
VPLC is lobbying Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam to issue an executive order that will keep the budget language in place that requires landlords to provide information and assistance to tenants applying for rent relief funds, in order to keep people housed and avoid rental roadblocks in their futures.
“Many landlords use third-party vendors to get rental history and look at prospective renters’ court records to look at payment records from prior landlords,” Marra says. “Most will not rent to someone who has any kind of eviction activity on their record. It’s a ‘Scarlet E’ on the tenant’s record and makes it difficult for that tenant to get good-quality housing.”
In 2016, Richmond made national news when the Eviction Lab at Princeton University found that the city had the second highest eviction rate in the country at 11.4%. The latest study from the RVA Eviction Lab at Virginia Commonwealth University on 2021’s first quarter shows the highest concentration of evictions in Richmond were found in ZIP codes in the East End, South Side and North Side — neighborhoods hit hard by the pandemic. During that time period, there were 128 evictions in Richmond, 108 in Henrico and 75 in Chesterfield through the courts, despite the moratorium; some people did not fill out the required paperwork to qualify.
Ben Teresa, RVA Eviction Lab’s co-director, believes the CDC moratorium simply delayed an inevitable surge of evictions that he expects will occur upon its expiration.
Marra and Teresa say having fewer evictions during the pandemic doesn’t tell the whole story because courts were closed for extended periods. Marra adds that these figures also don’t include those who moved when they couldn’t pay their rent or after their first eviction notice, nor do they show how far behind people are in their rent.
Teresa says other harmful trends like leases not being renewed continue to be a problem. “The long-term issues like the lack of affordable housing and high levels of unemployment still haven’t been addressed,” he says.
