Tenant rights groups have been sounding the alarm about an impending post-pandemic eviction crisis. In Los Angeles, that day has come—putting hundreds of thousands of tenants at risk of losing their housing and compelling some to fight back.
Nearly forty thousand have received eviction notices in Los Angeles since February, an experience Lupita Romero, who has lived at Hillside Villa for thirteen years, described to Jacobin in the following terms:
Tenants and tenant advocates have long been sounding the alarm about the impending post-pandemic eviction crisis. As COVID-19 tenant protections have been peeled away, the recent wave of evictions in Los Angeles reflects a broader trend in cities across the United States.
In Los Angeles, following a unanimous city council vote, the last eviction protections were lifted on March 31, requiring all tenants to begin paying full rent from April 1. Meanwhile, tenants who owe back rent incurred in the pandemic’s early stages, between March 2020 and October 2021, we were required to repay that debt in full by August 1 — a deadline that is expected to accelerate eviction filings in the weeks and months to come. Another deadline looms on February 1, 2024, when rent debt incurred between October 2021 and February 2023 must be repaid.
Eviction filings began increasing even before the protections were lifted. By the end of 2022, eviction filings in Los Angeles County reached pre-pandemic levels, and, according to a report developed by Strategic Action for a Just Economy (SAJE), as of June 2023, they have exceeded pre-pandemic levels and are in fact higher than at any point over the last decade. As a result, there has been a 9 percent increase in homelessness over the past year, with Los Angeles County seeing an estimated 75,518 unhoused people on the streets on any given night.
Meanwhile, according to the National Equity Atlas, more than 278,000 households in Los Angeles County are currently behind on rent, owing a staggering combined total of $981 million in rent debt. Notably, this figure does not include “shadow debt,” describing the widespread practice of borrowing money from family or friends, taking out payday loans, or maxing out credit cards to cover expenses like rent — a common practice for many tenants, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic. For Los Angeles tenants, 56 percent of whom are rent burdened — with another 31 percent classified as severely rent burdened — this can mean a disastrous convergence of two interconnected crises: the eviction crisis and the debt crisis.
Write a Reply or Comment
You should Sign In or Sign Up account to post comment.