A nationwide moratorium on residential evictions expired at midnight Saturday after a last-minute effort by the Biden administration to win an extension failed, putting hundreds of thousands of tenants at risk of losing shelter, while tens of billions in federal funding intended to pay their back rent sits untapped.
The moratorium -- put in place almost 11 months ago by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- has pitted landlords against tenants, judges against housing advocates, Republicans against Democrats. While parts of the economy show signs of strength, the recovery has not carried everyone equally. Almost a year and a half since the pandemic began, many renters still haven't caught up on their bills or gotten access to federal aid.
The expiration was a setback for President Joe Biden, whose team has tried for months to fix a dysfunctional emergency rent-relief program to help struggling renters and landlords. Running out of time and desperate to head off a possible wave of evictions, the White House abruptly shifted course Thursday, throwing responsibility to Congress and prompting a frenzied -- and ultimately unsuccessful -- rescue operation by Democrats in the House on Friday.
In June, the CDC extended the ban for one final month, intensifying pressure on the Biden administration, along with state and local governments, to significantly ramp up the amount of rental assistance reaching tenants and landlords.
Hampered by a lack of action by the Trump administration, which left no real plan to carry out the program, Biden's team has struggled to build a viable federal-local funding pipeline, hindered by state governments that view the initiative as a burden and the ambivalence of many landlords.
All together, Congress appropriated $46 billion toward emergency rental aid. Only $3 billion, or about 7%, has been spent.
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Just 36 out of more than 400 states, counties and cities reporting data to the Treasury Department were able to spend half of the money allotted them by the end of June. Another 49 hadn't spent any funds at all.
The eviction moratorium had become a target for landlords and federal judges who argued the CDC did not have the authority to keep the ban in place. The Supreme Court in June allowed the moratorium to stay in place through July. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote at the time that any further extensions would require "clear and specific congressional authorization" through new legislation.
But there was little chance that Republicans on Capitol Hill would agree, and by the time White House officials asked, only two days remained before the freeze expired, angering Democratic leaders who said they had no time to build support for the move.
"Really, we only learned about this yesterday," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who had publicly and privately urged senior Biden administration officials to deal with the problem themselves.
"What a devastating failure to act in a moment of crisis," said Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which had pressed for an extension of the moratorium. "As the delta variant surges and our understanding of its dangers grow, the White House punts to Congress in the final 48 hours and the House leaves for summer break."
The federal eviction moratorium was effective, reducing by about half the number of eviction cases that normally would have been filed since last fall, according to an analysis of filings by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University.
Advocates have argued it is also a public health imperative, because evictions make it harder for people to socially distance.
The lapse of the federal freeze is offset by other pro-tenant initiatives that are still in place. Many states and localities, including New York and California, have extended their own moratoriums, which should blunt some of the effect. In some places, judges, cognizant of the potential for a mass wave of displacement, have said they would slow-walk cases and make greater use of eviction-diversion programs.
Friday, several government agencies, including the Federal Housing Finance Agency, along with the Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development and Veterans Affairs departments, announced that they would extend their eviction moratoriums until Sept. 30.
Nonetheless, there is the potential for a rush of eviction filings beginning this week -- in addition to the more than 450,000 eviction cases already filed in courts in the largest cities and states since the pandemic began in March 2020.
An estimated 11 million adult renters are considered seriously delinquent on their rent payment, according to a survey by the Census Bureau, but no one knows how many renters are in danger of being evicted in the near future.
Bailey Bortolin, a tenants lawyer who works for the Nevada Coalition of Legal Service Providers, said the absence of the moratorium would lead many owners to dump their backlog of eviction cases into the courts this week, prompting many renters who received an eviction notice to simply vacate their apartments rather than fight it out.
"I think what we will see on Monday is a drastic increase in eviction notices going out to people, and the vast majority won't go through the court process," Bortolin said.
The moratorium had been set to expire June 30, but the White House and CDC, under pressure from tenants groups, extended the freeze until July 31, in the hopes of using the time to accelerate the flow of rental assistance.
A crash effort followed, led by Gene Sperling, who was appointed in March to oversee Biden's pandemic relief efforts, including emergency rental assistance programs created by coronavirus aid laws enacted in 2020 and 2021.
Sperling, working with officials in the Treasury Department, moved to loosen application requirements and increase coordination among the state governments, legal aid lawyers, housing court officials and local nonprofits with expertise in mediating landlord-tenant disputes.
In June, 290,000 tenants received $1.5 billion in pandemic relief, according to Treasury Department statistics released July 21. To date, about 600,000 tenants have been helped under the program.
But administration officials concede the improvements have not progressed quickly enough.
In a statement Friday evening, Biden sought to put the onus on local officials to provide housing aid, saying "there can be no excuse for any state or locality not accelerating funds to landlords and tenants."
"Every state and local government must get these funds out to ensure we prevent every eviction we can," he added.
Big and small landlords are nearly unanimous in their disdain for the CDC's moratorium and the patchwork of state and local moratoriums that have augmented it.
"They just said, 'You cannot evict and that's it,'" said Shaker Viswanathan, 65, who owns 16 units in San Diego. "The tenants are the ones that they are trying to take care of, and not anybody else. We still have to make mortgage payments."
Kristen Randall, a constable who oversees evictions in the Tucson, Ariz., area, has been reaching out to people on both sides to figure out what happens next.
It is a mixed, cloudy picture. Some landlords who are waiting for tenants to get rental assistance are in no rush to evict. Others are planning to take legal action this week to enforce judgments against tenants they have already taken to court.
Randall spent part of Friday visiting renters who faced imminent eviction.
"It has been an emotional day," she said.
Randall repeated what she has been telling those tenants: "When you leave on your own, it is better than me showing up and locking you out."
Information for this article was contributed by Glenn Thrush, Matthew Goldstein and Conor Dougherty of The New York Times and by Rachel Siegel, Jonathan O'Connell, Anu Narayanswamy and Alyssa Fowers of The Washington Post.