Eviction restrictions must be paired with rental assistance
For more than two months, families across Minnesota have been living under a heightened and hostile immigration enforcement presence in their communities. The economic fallout has been immediate and severe. People are afraid to go to work, open their businesses, or even complete everyday tasks like grocery shopping. As businesses close and parents can’t safely go to work without risking being separated permanently from their children, families are losing the income they rely on to pay their rent. As a result, the number of families falling behind on rent and facing eviction has increased significantly.
When families can’t pay rent, stopping evictions feels like the fastest way to protect them.
– Hoang Murphy, CEO
But what we learned during the pandemic is that eviction moratoriums without accompanying rental assistance create significant debt traps that frequently lead to homelessness.
Eviction restrictions alone don’t keep people from needing to pay their rent. Instead, they only delay when payment is due. As a result, significant rent debt accumulates and follows families long after protections are lifted. After the COVID eviction moratorium was lifted, we saw a surge of families with rental debt as one of their biggest barriers to achieving stable housing, and the need for shelter rose at the same time because families owed thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars in back rent they could not pay. Rental debt leads to eviction and prevents families from finding alternative housing.
Additionally, eviction restrictions negatively affect many affordable housing providers operating on thin margins and unable to bear the cost of unpaid rent. We’ve seen what happens when we shift the cost to affordable housing providers; many leave the space, and the already short supply of affordable housing units dwindles.
If the goal is to prevent eviction and keep families housed, then we have to create solutions that don’t perpetuate cycles of poverty through debt traps. That’s why we advocate for direct financial support in the form of emergency rental assistance, provided in meaningful increments (three or six months). Families don’t get caught in impossible debt traps, and housing providers get paid. Eviction moratoriums are unnecessary when we choose to address the problem holistically and with foresight. Cities and counties can act now and invest in rent stabilization funds that pay housing providers directly while keeping families housed.
Eviction moratoriums, without accompanying rental assistance, only delay displacement; they don’t prevent it. Rental assistance is the best solution to prevent displacement for the short- and long-term.
