Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Renters' Apocalypse

Last month, in a critter post, I touched on the upcoming eviction crisis which is now upon thousands of renters in New York as the governor's eviction moratorium expires. The eviction crisis is nationwide, as states such as California, Texas scramble to forestall a 'tsunami' of evictions... some states could see a mind-boggling eviction rate of sixty percent. Predictably, black and latin renters are particularly vulnerable to eviction, a vicious corollary to the elevated risks posed to these communities by the pandemic.

There are plenty of pieces written about preventing an eviction crisis which potentially puts forty million Americans on the street, but these solutions require a will to help financially struggling residents (always an 'iffy' prospect in this Capitalist Paradise) and a political system which functions. Put succinctly, I'm not confident that this apocalyptic housing crisis will be averted. I can't even wrap my head around the danger posed by throwing millions of people into an already overtaxed shelter system while a highly contagious viral pandemic ravages the country.

3 comments:

Anathema Device said...

"these solutions require a will to help financially struggling residents (always an 'iffy' prospect in this Capitalist Paradise) and a political system which functions"

So basically, they're fucked.

The amount of money involved to sort this out, in the scale of things, is sofa change. Yet this is too much for Mitch and his chums to countenance.

If they ever manage to drown the federal government in a bathtub, bet make sure that lot are having a nice long soak at the same time.

John said...

One problem with evicting renters is there's no takers, and the rentiers still have their own mortgages to pay off, now with no income as well. Jim Morrison raved about the whole shithouse collapsing. Strange days, indeed.

Al said...

I live in the most hated, evil and dangerous country on the planet. A country built on the twin corpses of genocide of the native people and enslavement of black people. A country that is responsible for the death of 20 million people around the planet since the end of WWII and every President since then should have been hanged as a war criminal. Every American has acquiesced and abetted this horror by voting for Democrats and Republicans. And now the American War on Terror has turned on it's own citizens as we see the reality of a racist, white supremacist, militarized police state kill whoever and whenever it wants. The United States is beyond salvation and redemption as plague stalks the land.