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Collection: Coronavirus and Cascadia

Cascadia Re-Ups Eviction Moratoriums As Federal Ban Expires

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Family at Home, In the Kitchen

Since the pandemic shut down the US in March, two factors have held off an explosion of US renters losing their homes: emergency federal unemployment insurance (UI) payments of $600 per week and eviction bans at multiple levels of government. But now the expiration of the federal eviction moratorium and the expiration of the UI payments today have renters facing an uncertain future and lawmakers scrambling to strike a deal. 

In May, House Democrats passed the $3 trillion Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act, which would have extended both the UI payments and the moratorium on evictions (and expand it to include all renters), in addition to $100 billion of emergency aid for renters. This week, Senate Republicans finally introduced their $1 trillion aid package counterproposal, which slashes UI payments by two-thirds and does not include an eviction ban.

The federal eviction ban, part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed in late March, covered over a quarter of US rental homes. A patchwork of state and local moratoriums has also been protecting many renters, but these bans are temporary, and many have ended or soon will. If the Senate severely curtails financial support for renters in the next relief package while failing to renew or expand the federal eviction moratorium, state and local eviction bans will become an even bigger factor in keeping renters in their homes.

In an April article, Sightline catalogued the eviction bans put in place across Cascadia in response to the coronavirus crisis and its economic fallout. Here is an update.

Expiration of federal eviction moratorium puts 12 million renters at risk

The federal moratorium on evictions had banned eviction filings over nonpayment of rent and late fees for homes with federally backed mortgages issued through Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, or the Federal Housing Administration. The ban also applied to homes supported with US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funding, including Section 8 vouchers, Low-Income Housing Tax Credits, rural housing voucher programs, public housing, and more. These protections applied to about 12 million of the total 44 million US rental homes.

Upon the ban’s expiration July 25, landlords can once again issue eviction notices. But even prior to the expiration date, some landlords had pursued evictions despite the federal law. Since CARES Act did not impose penalties for landlords who try to evict tenants from federally protected properties, unscrupulous landlords could try to intimidate tenants who don’t understand the law into leaving their homes.

Congress will likely decide the fate of an eviction ban in the next coronavirus aid package over the next two weeks, as the clock ticks toward its August recess.

State eviction bans still protect most renters in Cascadia

In the meantime, most states in Cascadia still have eviction moratoriums in place that help prevent landlords from removing renters from their homes.

Washington

Washington’s eviction moratorium was set to expire August 1 until the Governor Jay Inslee extended it through October 15. The new moratorium clarifies that landlords may only serve eviction notices if there is a health and safety risk or if the landlord provides a 60-day written notice of their intent to live in the unit or sell it. The new order also maintains the ban on rent increases for residential units as well as commercial units impacted by COVID-19. It does, however, establish a work group to investigate reauthorizing rent increases.

Oregon

Before the state’s 90-day eviction ban expired at the end of June, the Oregon legislature passed House Bill 4213, which extended the eviction moratorium through September. The bill applies only to cases of nonpayment of rent and gives tenants six months after the ban ends to pay back rent.

Idaho

An April court order stopped eviction court proceedings until May, after which courts could resume evictions remotely. But last week an Ada County judge effectively barred evictions when he struck down a statute in the Idaho Constitution that banned the right to a jury trial for tenants facing eviction, since jury trials for civil cases are still on hold until October 5.

Alaska

Alaska’s eviction ban, which the state legislature enacted in late March, expired at the end of June. The ban had prevented evictions based on nonpayment of rent for those financially impacted by COVID-19. The Alaska Supreme Court ordered that non-jury eviction cases could proceed beginning July 1, making tenants in places not protected by local bans vulnerable to eviction.

Some local governments’ bans offer further protection while others rely on state moratoriums

Sightline’s previous article inventoried city and county bans as of April. Since then, localities have largely relied on state moratoriums, but some local governments have taken their own action.

In Washington, Seattle’s eviction moratorium was set to run through June. As both city and state bans neared expiration, the city council was prompted to extend it through the end of the year. This extension grants a defense from eviction in cases of nonpayment of rent, which King County also approved in a similar measure for unincorporated areas. Portland, Oregon, on the other hand, didn’t update its eviction moratorium, which now falls under the state ban that lasts only through September.

But not all of Cascadia’s major cities fully banned evictions at the local level. Boise, Idaho, initially banned evictions for public housing units, but the measure expired after April 30 and the city hasn’t established any other eviction protections, though eviction cases are halted throughout Idaho until October.

Anchorage stands out as the largest Cascadian city without any eviction protections. With the expiration of Alaska’s moratorium in June and the federal ban ending last week, Anchorage tenants who have lost their jobs during the pandemic can now be evicted freely. Motivated by the looming threat, the Anchorage Assembly is now considering a proposal to ban evictions through September.

Allowances for payback plans offer buffer time for tenants after eviction bans end

Eviction bans don’t exempt tenants from their legal obligation to pay back rent. Most renters who have been struggling financially won’t have the resources to pay all their back rent and utility bills right away, which could put them at risk of eviction once again down the road.

The CARES Act gives tenants 30 days to pay missed rent after the federal eviction ban ends—a bare minimum timeframe that’s likely insufficient for most cash-strapped renters. To further protect renters from this bind, some state and local governments have enacted requirements for landlords to offer tenants extended payment plans. Washington and Oregon, as well as Seattle, Portland, Multnomah County, and Beaverton, Oregon, and British Columbia currently have such rules.

Portland and Multnomah County were the first Cascadian jurisdictions to establish a six-month grace period for tenants to pay back rent and missed utility payments; the neighboring city of Beaverton quickly followed. In Seattle, the city council approved a similar six-month grace period and specified a default payment schedule where tenants make payments in three to six equal installments, depending on the amount owed. Washington barred landlords from pursuing eviction in the future if rent wasn’t paid due to COVID-19, unless the tenant refuses a payment plan or defaults on one. However, Washington’s rules don’t specify a length of time or schedule for the payment plan. When Oregon extended its eviction moratorium through September, it also established a six-month grace period for tenants to pay back rent and allowed landlords to propose a voluntary payment plan schedule.

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Alaska Finances: A Cautionary Tale

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For those looking to understand the risks of hitching an economy to fossil fuels—and for those trying to determine how to manage a transition away from dirty energy—it’s instructive to examine the fiscal meltdown happening in Alaska in 2020.

Relief Buoys BC’s Affordable Housing Providers—So Far

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The people who manage co-op and nonprofit housing in British Columbia braced themselves for the worst on April 1. It seemed likely that BC’s affordable housing providers would be hit hard as the pandemic cut a swath through BC jobs and people weren’t able to pay their rent .

Government-assisted housing is home to many in BC who work at low- or modest-paying jobs—first in line for furloughs, reduced hours, and layoffs. Co-ops and nonprofits account for the vast majority of the estimated 113,000 subsidized households in the province. (Both types of providers serve a mix of incomes and not all units are subsidized.)

Lock downs and safety precautions added extra costs for nonprofit and co-op housing providers as well: more cleaning, more units empty because people couldn’t move in. But things have worked out surprisingly well, say those who lead the umbrella associations of nonprofit and co-op housing in BC. 

Providers of subsidized homes are staying afloat in large part because the BC government stepped up.


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Providers of subsidized homes are staying afloat in large part because the BC government stepped up with support, from bending the usual rules so that more people could access rent-relief programs to providing extra money for subsidies, cleaning equipment, and more.

“The provincial government has been very proactive,” said Thom Armstrong, the CEO of the Co-operative Housing Federation of BC, which represents the interests of the almost 16,000 BC households who live in co-ops (0.9 percent of BC’s total households).

On the non-profit side, which accounts for 65,000 units in the province, operators are assured that BC Housing, the provincial agency that oversees directly subsidized homes, will provide subsidies to compensate for tenants’ plummeting incomes.

“I’m confident the government will be there. We just don’t know what shape it will take,” said Jill Atkey, the CEO of the BC Non-Profit Housing Association.

1990s-era social housing (foreground) in Vancouver, BC. Photo by Frances Bula, used with permission.

BC’s social-housing system is big—and complicated

BC Housing, which spent $1.25 billion in its most recent fiscal year, provides subsidies for housing through a variety of mechanisms. There are direct subsidies, based on a rent-geared-to-income practice, in the 5,500 units of old-style public housing that it still owns and manages. Independent non-profit providers get subsidies based on their income mix, along with a lot of supervision of their budgets and operations. And the agency provides rent “supplements” to another 34,200 households in the private market. 

The agency also manages the development of new home creation projects that are part of the NDP government’s aggressive building plan (it funded 4,000 new units in its most recent fiscal year), housing that is typically turned over to nonprofits. 

Management of these homes is in keeping with the philosophy throughout Canada since the 1980s to serve communities better by shifting away from projects dominated by low-income households requiring a subsidy, and toward mixed-income buildings, run by nonprofits or co-ops, that charge rent on a sliding scale. Typical rents in a single building can range from a minimum of $375 (the shelter amount of a welfare check) to a maximum that is pegged to the low end of what is available in the private market in that neighborhood.  

And those projects can take many different shapes because of the way government-supported housing works in Canada—a far more complex and multi-layered system than what exists in the American part of Cascadia.

The US federal government’s main tool for creating subsidized housing doesn’t exist in Canada: the low-income housing tax credit. Created in 1986, it provides a stream of investment money, with rules about what the projects are supposed to achieve. These tax credits have flowed into more than three million units since the start.

But Canada’s federal government withdrew from any kind of tax benefit programs to incentivize rental housing by the early 1980s and ended its direct support for new social housing in 1994. Since then, it has been left mainly to the provinces to fund new subsidized housing projects and to manage those left over from the federal system. 

BC remained a leader among Canadian provinces, continuing to provide money for new developments, except for a few years after the BC Liberals were elected in 2001. Some BC cities have stepped up in recent years by providing free or nearly free land and density bonuses to help with construction of new social, but it’s the province that pays all the bills for operating subsidies.

Government-supported housing in the province operates under myriad rules, many of which can be rigid. Non-profits have their budgets carefully scrutinized by BC Housing, can’t always retain surpluses, must adhere to complicated rent level requirements, and have to fill out forms every time a household’s income changes.

“In the States, it’s run a bit more like a system. And the tax-credit program gives the operator so much more flexibility,” says Atkey. “Here it’s prescriptive. And, among the 65,000 units of non-profit housing, there are at least 30 different programs.”

That’s just among the non-profits. Co-op housing is a whole other system—one that’s almost unknown in the United States. Unlike co-ops in the US, which tend to be more of the private-equity kind, famous in New York for their rigorous screening of prospective tenants, Canadian co-ops are collective non-profits that don’t allow for sales of individual units. 

Instead, people accepted as members in Canadian co-ops pay a small share to join and the co-op as a whole remains the property of the legal association running it. They became popular in the 1980s, originally supported with federal subsidies to cover part of the cost of their mortgages. Co-ops are managed by boards of their residents, who decide on the mix of income levels and subsidies the group can sustain.

The constraints imposed by the high level of government control have been balanced by an upside during a cataclysmic event like the pandemic: the close link has meant more immediate lines of communication between the province and BC’s affordable housing providers—and tenants—and more efficient  government support. That’s a contrast to the American side of Cascadia, where non-profits have been struggling through the pandemic with little backstopping from governments. 

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Will Clear Roads and Clean Skies Outlast the Pandemic?

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Telework during the coronavirus lockdown.

The demands of social distancing have caused an unprecedented substitution of virtual interactions for physical travel. Surveys by MIT and Data for Progress found that by the end of March, more than a third of US workers had switched to working remotely. In addition, half of physicians have adopted telehealth to deliver patient care. Many employers expect these changes to endure even after distancing guidelines relax, which—if the region makes the right moves—could wrest from this crisis some lasting progress for Cascadia’s roads and skies.

The scale and speed of the shift to telework is staggering. Zoom, a digital conferencing services provider (whose name has become a buzzword of the lockdowns), saw its active users jump from 10 million to 200 million. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, reported a sixtyfold increase in the use of Microsoft Teams, the company’s online collaboration tool. Amid the public health crisis and economic devastation, technology has allowed parts of social and economic life to carry on.

But many aspects of economic life can’t go online, as evidenced by the breathtaking loss of at least 30 million US jobs in just five weeks—a scale of unemployment matched only by the Great Depression. Collectively, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington have lost more than 1 million jobs in that same period—losses that disproportionately affect Cascadia’s most vulnerable people. The coronavirus has amplified the already cruel inequalities in our society.

The Data for Progress survey from the end of March shows unequal adoption rates for work-from-home by income and education. Among high-income workers, 56 percent moved online while just 25 percent of low-income workers were able to make the switch. Because more high-income workers could work remotely, they were less likely to lose their jobs. While the official unemployment rate for April was an alarming 15 percent, nearly 40 percent of households earning less than $40,000 per year had lost a job according to the Federal Reserve.

There are no silver linings for people suffering from illness, death, loss of income, and the gnawing uncertainty of what will happen next. And yet forward-looking responses to the immediate public health and economic crisis could lay the foundation for a more equitable and environmentally sustainable economy in the next decade. A durable shift to remote work could help enable a more sustainable future if organizations make productive use of telepresence technologies part of the new normal.

Let’s look at what’s happened to work in technology and medicine in response to COVID-19 and, with those examples in mind, consider how a more permanent substitution of telepresence for many face-to-face meetings could alter future travel demand.

Big tech (mostly) working from home

Cascadia’s technology companies were among the first in North America to recommend and then require their employees to work from home. Amazon, Microsoft, T-Mobile, and the Pacific Northwest outposts of Facebook and Google all initiated work-from-home policies at the beginning of March. Since then, these enterprises have sustained and even expanded their businesses while most of their employees work from home.

In the midst of the pandemic, T-Mobile completed its acquisition of Sprint on April 1 and kicked off plans to invest $40 billion in wireless communication infrastructure over the next three years. Remote workers at Microsoft supported massive growth in the use of its cloud software platforms; the company now plans for all of its major events in 2020 to happen online. Amazon has supported a flood of new demand for its e-commerce services and started hiring an additional 100,000 workers. Even with a drastic reduction in face-to-face meetings, big tech companies have functioned at a high level, serving a new demand that’s helped raise their stock prices.

It’s not only high-income workers making the shift. By the end of March, T-Mobile had transitioned nearly 15,000 domestic and international customer service workers from densely packed call centers to their homes. By early April, all 17 of T-Mobile’s internal call centers had transitioned to home-based work.

Amazon’s hiring binge for additional warehouse workers makes clear that key aspects of the technology economy must occur outside the home, in conditions that can threaten worker safety. Indeed, the pandemic compounds existing inequities between white collar workers and those with jobs deemed “essential”—that can’t be done from home. But, concern over Amazon’s corporate behavior have prompted new alliances among workers to advocate for improved warehouse conditions and a reduction in Amazon’s environmental footprint. And whether it is labor organizing, delivering cell service, or building capacity to host more video conferences, people in tech now accomplish far more of their work remotely.

The rapid embrace of remote work and virtual medicine offers some hope that post-pandemic, Cascadia could see a reduced demand for road space from autos and corresponding reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.


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By early May, Amazon and Microsoft had extended their work-from-home policy to at least October. Some tech companies, like Twitter, are going a step further and making work-from-home permanent. Across the country, employers now look to extend telework into the foreseeable future. In New York City the three largest commercial office tenants in Manhattan plan to reduce their leased office space as they adopt long-term work-from-home policies.  A survey of 400 downtown Seattle businesses shows that a majority plan to delay a full return to work, stagger shifts or permanently adopt work-from-home.

A close-to-my-heart example: my niece leads a Seattle start-up company building cloud-based software solutions for the real estate industry. Following the example of Seattle’s tech giants, her company went fully remote in the beginning of March. After four weeks, she polled her staff and discovered a large majority preferred working at home. She plans to slash her office expenses and find lower cost venues for face-to-face meetings in the future when they are required for the business and allowed by public health authorities. One month of remote work proved they could be as or more productive as a virtual company, reduce overhead, and save her staff the stress, time, and expense of daily commuting. 

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US House to Vote on Rent Relief, Eviction Bans, and Cash Payments

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5/15 UPDATE: The House passed the stimulus bill despite opposition from some progressive Democrats who believed the bill didn’t go far enough to protect workers and some moderates who criticized the lack of bipartisan support. 

On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) announced a $3 trillion stimulus package—including key worker and renter protections like rent relief, eviction bans, and cash payments—to soften the economic blow of the COVID-19 shutdowns on American workers and businesses. Over a month has passed since Congress approved the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, the first major stimulus package. Since mid-March, over 36 million workers have filed for unemployment while more than 1 in 5  households reported experiencing food insecurity in the past month. Among households making less than $40,000 annually, 40 percent lost jobs in March. 

The ambitious Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act includes a range of Democrat priorities such as providing nearly $1 trillion to mitigate budget losses for state, local, and tribal governments; $25 billion to support the US Postal Service; extending emergency family and sick leave through 2021, and more. 

To help stabilize renters and workers, the new bill includes:

  • $100 billion in rental and utility assistance and $500 million for supportive housing; 
  • A moratorium on evictions based on nonpayment of rent for all tenants;
  • One-time direct cash payments of $1,200 to individuals making below $75,000 annually as well as $1,200 for each child (up to three).

The House plans to vote on the proposal Friday, and with Democrats in the majority the bill will pass if the party rallies behind leadership’s proposal. But there are no plans for a vote in the Senate, where Republicans have resisted calls for another relief package. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) described the bill as “dead on arrival,” while Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) criticized Democrat priorities and seemed to defer to the White House for direction. 

The path to Senate passage of the bill is unclear, especially without major concessions to Senate Republicans—such concessions led to nearly $500 billion in corporate bailouts in the CARES Act. Democrats face a tough road ahead to prioritize federal support for workers and renters over corporate handouts. 

Package would build on Democrats’ recent proposals

Rental assistance
The HEROES Act incorporates a recent rent relief proposal from Washington Representative Denny Heck, who partnered with Representative Maxine Waters (D-California) and Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to secure $100 billion in tenant assistance.


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The HEROES Act incorporates a recent rent relief proposal from Washington Representative Denny Heck, who partnered with Representative Maxine Waters (D-California) and Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) to secure $100 billion in tenant assistance. Low- and middle-income renters struggling to pay rent and utility bills would access these funds through state and local programs. 

HUD would develop formulas to specify funding amounts for each state, city, and county, with guaranteed allotments of two percent to tribes and 0.3 percent to territories (excluding Puerto Rico). Anyone making up to 80 percent of area median income (AMI), and unable to pay housing costs due to financial hardships, could apply to their state, county, or local government for assistance. The law would require prioritization of funding for renters making less than 50 percent of AMI. HUD would start dispersing funds within a month and grantees would have another month to make payments directly to housing providers.

The bill would also allocate $500 million in supplemental FY2020 funding for Section 8 project-based assistance as well as supportive housing programs for the elderly, people with disabilities, and people with HIV/AIDS. 

Homeowners could also qualify for substantial benefits from the HEROES Act, even though on average they tend to be more economically secure than renters. It would provide $75 billion to fund mortgage, utility, and property tax and insurance relief. 

Eviction moratorium

Building on the eviction moratorium put in place by the CARES Act, the new relief proposal would enact a year-long ban on eviction filings over nonpayment of rent for all residential tenants, a bold and unprecedented move for the US. The previous national eviction ban only applied to renters in homes with federally-backed mortgages. Otherwise, currently only a patchwork of individual state and local moratoriums stand in the way of eviction, leaving tenants to slip through the cracks as some landlords have pursued eviction filings even in the midst of the national public health emergency. 

For those who own rather than rent, the bill expands to all homeowners the CARES Act foreclosure moratorium which originally applied only to homes with federally-backed mortgages. It also offers mortgage forbearance for up to a year, after which loan servicers must offer payment plans that either tack on missed mortgage payments to the end of the period or extend the payment period (as some banks already offered to do), ensuring that mortgage payments stay at the same rates as before the crisis. Loan servicers could also reduce payments, if the owner can’t pay pre-crisis level payments, though the bill doesn’t mandate this. 

The bill doesn’t provide analogous payback flexibility for renters, who could be forced to come up with the full amount of back rent they owe within 30 days of the state of emergency ending or face eviction, unless protected by local or state ordinances. For example, Seattle’s City Council passed legislation this week creating a “default payment plan” for tenants to pay back overdue rent in three to six monthly installments, depending on the amount owed. This builds on a directive from Washington’s governor that landlords must pursue tenant payment plans before considering eviction at the end of the moratorium. Los Angeles and other localities like Beaverton, Multnomah County, and Portland, OR, have all enacted similar measures. 

Cash assistance

Mirroring the one-time cash assistance payments in the CARES Act, the new bill would provide $1,200 for each taxpayer making less than $75,000 annually (or less than $150,000 for couples). It raises the CARES Act’s $500 per child benefit to $1,200 per child for up to three children. That adds up to a maximum of $6,000 for families of five or more

Because the economic crisis will far outlast one-time payments, Representatives Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan), Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), Ro Khanna (D-California), and Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), and Senators Kamala Harris (D-California), Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) had proposed ongoing monthly cash assistance. But House leadership opted against trying to include that more comprehensive (and costly) type of longer-term relief. Without such support, laid-off, furloughed, and other unemployed people will struggle to pay basic living costs as the crisis persists. As my Sightline colleagues Michael Anderson and Margaret Morales have argued, ongoing cash benefits are a good way to provide a social safety net even during normal times.  

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