After Supreme Court Ruling, A Tsunami Of Evictions Is Set Overwhelm US

Following a Supreme Court ruling that ended the moratorium, evictions are resuming in the United States.

Eugene Puryear talks about the impact of this judgement on millions who might face a housing crisis even as the pandemic continues to rage on

The Supreme Court of the United States has struck down the moratorium on evictions of tenants. Evictions are set to resume in many parts of the country from today. The ruling has left millions of Americans at risk of losing their shelter during the pandemic. Eugene Puryear of BreakThrough News talks about the judgment, its impact on the people, and the response of movements across the country.

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Women In A Housing Cooperative Build Their Own Homes

Like every other country, Nicaragua needs more affordable housing.

To deal with the shortage, in many places it’s trying out community-based solutions, sharing responsibility between the government, the local authority and the families that need better conditions.

It relies on mutual aid: hours of work put in voluntarily by those benefitting from a scheme, to build not only their own houses but those of their neighbours. It’s a cooperative that really works.

I talked to two women members of one such group, Yadira Aguirre and Margine Martínez, about their work building houses in their small community in La Dalia in the mountainous north of Nicaragua.

They are working women, part of a group whose main earnings come from coffee harvesting on large farms for three months each year.

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Mass Evictions Underway In Starkville

T. Young’s reprieve from homelessness was three days. The mother of four rushed home Friday when she heard the news. When she arrived, officers were still traveling door to door at Catherine Street Apartments in Starkville, flanking a representative from her new rental company. They were informing the residents that the mass-eviction process that started only weeks before was resolving, and resolving quickly.

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Supreme Court Allows Evictions To Resume During Pandemic

Washington — The Supreme Court’s conservative majority is allowing evictions to resume across the United States, blocking the Biden administration from enforcing a temporary ban that was put in place because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The court’s action late Thursday ends protections for roughly 3.5 million people in the United States who said they faced eviction in the next two months, according to Census Bureau data from early August.

The court said in an unsigned opinion that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which reimposed the moratorium Aug. 3, lacked the authority to do so under federal law without explicit congressional authorization. The justices rejected the administration’s arguments in support of the CDC’s authority.

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Denver’s Housing First Initiative A ‘Remarkable Success’

Colorado – A five-year evaluation of Denver’s Social Impact Bond (SIB) program by The Urban Institute found the housing first initiative is a “remarkable success” at reducing chronic homelessness.

In all, the study found that 79 percent of people who received treatment under the program were engaged in stable housing. Those referred to SIB spent an average of 560 more days in housing than people who received other community assistance.

Overall, the study analyzed the cases of 724 program participants. After one year, 86 percent of people remained in stable housing. After two years, the number stood at 81 percent. And, after three years, over 77 percent of participants remained housed.

The program—one of the first in the country—also reduced shelter visits and police contacts for participants.

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Big Business Loves The Housing Crisis

What’s your favourite type of landlord? It’s an odd question, but it’s one that commentators keep asking as housing crises of various types continue to take shape across the world. In a recent series of articles, economist Brett Christophers analysed the workings of Blackstone, a New York-based asset management firm which has become a phenomenally successful (and deeply harmful) institutional player in American housing markets. At the moment, the picture in the UK is very different—small-scale individuals vastly outnumber institutions in the buy-to-let market—but there are signs that this is starting to change.

Last week, Lloyds Bank announced its plans to become one of the UK’s biggest landlords by buying 50,000 homes over the next four years – roughly equivalent to buying every dwelling in Exeter.

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Billions In Rent Assistance Money Withheld From Millions Facing Eviction

Out of the $46.5 billion in funding provided for rental assistance under two bailouts enacted in December 2020 and March 2021, the vast majority has not been distributed, with only an estimated $3 billion of the funds being distributed as of August 3 according to CNBC, while millions are at risk of eviction or foreclosure.

According to the Eviction Lab, in the six states and 31 cities tracked by it, 480, 456 evictions have taken place during the pandemic. In just those areas alone, 6,108 evictions were filed in the last week. This is in spite of the announcement on August 3 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the extension of the eviction moratorium to October 3 for counties “experiencing substantial and high levels of community transmission levels.”

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The Eviction Crisis Is A Race And Gender Wage Gap Issue

The federal eviction moratorium coincided with Black Women’s Equal Pay Day 2021, which marks the number of days into the year that the average Black woman has to work to catch up to the average white man’s annual earnings in 2020. Based on recent Census data, Black women make just 63 cents for every dollar earned by a white man.

If Black women’s earnings continue to grow as slowly as they have since the mid-1980s, it will take them more than 100 years — until 2133 — to reach pay equity with white men.

“Lower pay deprives Black women of resources they need to provide for themselves and their families and over a lifetime can really add up — the loss of earnings in D.C. alone adds up to almost $1 million dollars over 20 years,” said Chandra Childers, lead author of a new report on the wage gap from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

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Cooperatives And Community Land Trusts: Natural Partners?

The first ever presidential visit to the South Bronx took America’s chief executive to a multi-unit cooperative, a radical break from the nation’s housing norms that became a symbol of hope during the depths of the urban crisis.

In October 1977, Jimmy Carter’s cream-colored limousine rolled into the devastation of the South Bronx. Escorted by six motorcycles and three helicopters, the trip had been kept secret until the last possible moment. There were two stops on the tour. At one, Carter saw a ghost block where every building had been leveled, confirming the nightmarish popular image of this section of New York City.

The other stop was something else entirely. The president was driven to a multistory apartment building at 1186 Washington Ave., where tenants had taken control after the landlord walked away.

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It’s Not Enough To Restore Eviction Protections

With a new wave of COVID-19 cases rapidly increasing in the US, this victory, while for the moment averting disaster for millions of poor Americans, is ephemeral at best. If we are to truly protect Americans from a tsunami of evictions caused by pandemic-related lockdowns, US President Joe Biden must also cancel the rents.

The White House initially waffled on the issue of extending the moratorium, having been told by Associate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a late June ruling that he would oppose any further extension of the ban if done by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), providing a crucial fifth vote to strike down the order. However, with Congress heading into a seven-week summer recess having never attempted to pass such a law, activists and local residents joined Rep. Cori Bush’s (D-MO) occupation-style protest outside the Capitol building to demand the ban be extended past July 31.

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Palestinians Refuse To Concede Land Rights To Israelis In Sheikh Jarrah

Palestinian families facing ethnic cleansing from their Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem on Monday rejected a so-called “compromise” offer from Israel’s Supreme Court, which would allow them to remain in their homes if they recognize as rightful owners the Israeli settler group trying to steal the properties.

Under the Israeli high court proposal, four Palestinian families and dozens of others threatened with forced expulsion from the Sheikh Jarrah area would remain in the neighborhood as “protected tenants” who could not be evicted, as long as they acknowledged that Nahalat Shimon Company—a right-wing settler organization dating back to the early years of Zionist colonization of Palestine—as the lawful owner, and paid it NIS 1,500 ($465) in annual rent.

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Democrats Let US Eviction Moratorium Expire

The Biden administration announced Thursday that it would allow the nationwide ban on evictions to expire on Saturday declaring that it was up to Congress, with just two days to go, to extend the measure. The White House claimed that the President’s hands are tied, and there was nothing Biden could do for the more than six million families that have fallen behind on rent, citing the Supreme Court’s decision last month to only allow a moratorium extension until the end of July.

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Racism Is Magnifying The Deadly Impact Of Rising City Heat

To help reduce the risk of heat stroke and other heat-related illnesses, urban planners, meteorologists, climate experts and other scientists are working to identify the most vulnerable neighbourhoods. Underlying such efforts is a growing awareness of how extreme heat takes a disproportionate toll on people of colour and those in lower-income communities. Racist urban policies, particularly in the United States, have left communities of colour at higher risk of heat-related illness or death than their white neighbours.

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