Near the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a ban on evictions was imposed by federal and state governments. After numerous extensions, the policy has been ruled unconstitutional, sparking much outrage from progressives. Those on the economically conservative & libertarian side have condemned the ban. Interestingly, I've noticed quite a bit of division on this topic among liberals. After discussing and researching this topic, I've come to the conclusion that virtually all the anti-moratorium arguments are very flawed. As such, I wanted to offer refutations to some of them, and provide some evidence based advocacy for extending the eviction ban. (Note: This is purely focused on the merits of the eviction ban as a policy, not its constitutionality)
My position: The moratorium should've been extended for at least a few months, with an emphasis on rental aid distribution.
Refuting counter arguments:
"Extending the moratorium will exacerbate housing supply issues and raise rents" - Developers generally do not make decisions based on extensions of this policy. The data seems to support this: compare the data for monthly housing starts in 2020 and 2021 with a timeline of all the moratorium extensions. More importantly, here is the data for multi unit housing starts. If the eviction ban is scaring developers away, we should see reductions in the number of housing starts that correspond with the ban extensions. No such pattern seems to exist. Months like January 2021 and September 2020, which were directly after extensions, experienced stable amount of new projects. There were decreases after the March 29th, 2021 and June 24th, 2021 extensions, but equal or even greater dips happened in unrelated months like August of 2020. Overall, monthly housing starts haven't experienced a severe downward trend compared to what they were before the pandemic (this is less the case for multi unit housing). Rates have been quite variable. So then, what about rents? It is true that rents have been on the rise all across the US. It is also true that almost 1 in 4 mom and pop landlords are considering selling at least 1 property. However, the best solution to this would be providing aid to landlords, not forcing millions out of shelter. This is something I'll expand upon further along, especially because in all honesty, there's no hard evidence that subsidizing missed rent will stop most of these sales from happening, given how high housing prices are right now. However, these high prices might actually indicate that lifting the moratorium could have worsened rental supply. As argued in this MarketWatch article: "The resulting sales of properties that once were occupied by evicted tenants could create a prime opportunity for home buyers, especially first-time buyers. The lack of housing inventory nationwide has created more competition among buyers and driven prices to record highs across much of the country. Inevitably, many of the homes vacated by evicted tenants, if sold, could end up being bought by people who plan to live in the house themselves, rather than rent it out. This could create an even larger crisis for low-income renters."
"Extending the moratorium would be horrible for individual landlords" - With proper effort and attention, the federal government could easily keep landlords afloat. Since the onset of the pandemic, missed rental payment has amounted to $41.7 billion. This amount could have already been covered by the rental aid that has dispersed by the federal government to state and local governments over the course of the pandemic ($47 billion). However, this aid has been distributed at an obscenely slow pace (1)(2)(3). So you might be thinking, what's the guarantee that the aid would've been distributed any faster now? To distribute all of it, wouldn't the moratorium have had to remain for an extremely long time? Well, it's hard to say, but there is reason to believe that it'd be different. With so much at stake politically, the Biden administration has been taking steps to streamline aid administration and generally increasing efficiency, as well as lowering the barrier to entry for tenants. There is absolutely no guarantee that this will solve the issue; in fact, over 60 percent of those at risk have not applied for assistance, and this is likely an insurmountable problem. Despite this, landlords are generally a far less vulnerable group than the tenants who would suffer from lifting the ban. According to Brookings Institute, about 30 percent of landlord households earn less than $90k a year. Among landlords who earn less than 50k a year, about 20 percent of their income comes from renting out their properties. With the current speed of rental aid distribution, these people will suffer, there's no doubt about it. However, the poorest 20 percent of US households had more than half of their income eaten up by housing costs - and that was before the pandemic. Another point of interest is the rent payment tracker from 2019, 2020, and 2021. The amount of apartment tenants paying full or partial rent month to month hasn't been that much lower than it was pre-pandemic. For all renter occupied households, about 6% are paying zero rent and about 17% are paying partial rent. Anti-moratorium people love to invoke imagery of millions upon millions of freeloaders selfishly leaving their landlords high and dry; this notion is not supported by the data. On top of this, lets just look at the numbers. The share of individual landlords earning below 50k is less than 15%. If we round up to 15%, this means that we'll have about 1.2 million landlords who get screwed over by the moratorium (and this is if we assume none of them get rental aid). Meanwhile, after the ban was lifted, an estimated 3.5 million tenants will likely be evicted. The numbers for those "at risk" of eviction are even higher, ranging from 6-7.5 million (1)(2). I have no hatred towards landlords whatsoever, but it seems very strange to make appeals to their struggle when their tenants are far more vulnerable and numerous.
"The moratorium shouldn't be extended because it is a violation of property rights" - This might come down to a fundamental difference in philosophy. I believe that all policy should be viewed through the lens of maximizing the life, liberty, and happiness of as many people as possible. In my view, this consequence oriented mindset is why liberalism is so great and successful. So it really confuses me to see so many liberals make appeals to "fairness", pretending as though taking away people's right to evict is a fundamental moral wrong. Using this logic, the moratorium should've never been put in place at all - despite the fact that an estimated 30-40 million people were at risk of eviction at one point during the pandemic. Don't get it twisted, the actual number of people who would've gotten evicted is nowhere close to this. However, even if this number is off by an order of magnitude, we are still talking about many millions of people. This eviction crisis disproportionately harms communities of color, as well. There is also the fact that the moratorium has done a lot to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but I'll get to that later. If you are willing to let all this harm occur in order to protect the sanctity of a few million people's property rights, then our ideas of morality are just completely different.
"The moratorium is not suited for our current economy & our tight labor market" - I have seen many people point to the admittedly huge expansion of welfare and unemployment insurance (UI), as well as our tight labor market, as evidence that the housing-insecure should essentially "just get a job 4head". This is a conservative-tier argument which misses the true cause of our labor shortage. If you say that people with the safety net of welfare and secure housing should just find a job in the tight labor market, you are implying that the labor market is tight BECAUSE people have that safety net don't want to work. This understanding of our labor shortage can (and is) used to argue against things like UI, which is why it's so strange to hear this coming from liberals who undoubtedly supported Biden's stimulus bill. So, why is this such a flawed understanding of the economy? Well, current labor shortages are largely because of reallocation friction and a lack of child care. As service sectors were shut down by covid, displaced workers found better paying jobs in different sectors, and are happier there. These articles go deeper into this phenomenon and the evidence for it (1)(2). Supply chain issues are also a reason for layoffs in construction and manufacturing. Also consider that our unemployment rate is only about 5% right now, and labor force participation is stagnant. All this evidence shows that people with the housing/welfare safety net are not abstaining from work or freeloading.Only about 6% of them are paying zero rent. Most of the people who are badly affected by lifting the moratorium already have a job. And on the topic of the economy, the moratorium has been very effective at combating the spread of Covid, as getting evicted very commonly puts people in living situations where they are more prone to catching/spreading Covid. As we all should know by now, reducing the spread of Covid is crucial to economic health. Economic health is also driven by consumer spending; although this hasn't been extensively studied, some research does indicate that lifting the moratorium will hamper spending (1)(2). Something that has been studied more extensively is the effect of unemployment insurance on consumer spending. It has widely been found that without this safety net, many are far more careful with their funds (1)(2)(3)(4). I see no reason why this wouldn't apply to the moratorium. Oh, and I haven't mentioned the biggest reason why the "get a job" thing is stupid: the increased UI is expiring nationwide, and 25 states ended them early. Sure, people have had the chance to save, but let's not pretend like workers have all the support they need going forward.
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