This week’s revival of the national eviction ban is sending landlords scrambling again to pay their debts, just when they thought they would be able to begin evicting tenants who are not paying rent.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention enacted the eviction ban last September to prevent people with financial hardship from being evicted during the pandemic. Since then, many smaller landlords have struggled to collect their monthly rent checks and some have gone into forbearance on their mortgages.
“The government took a firm stance that there would be an end to the [ban],” said Bob Pinnegar, president and chief executive of the National Apartment Association, a landlord trade group. “Now, there’s no faith.”
The White House let the ban expire over the weekend. But it reversed course on Tuesday, issuing a 60-day extension that will apply to counties with elevated Covid-19 infection rates due to the spread of the Delta variant.
That new moratorium, if it is not successfully challenged in the courts by opponents who say the White House overstepped its authority, would mean that landlords will have gone more than a year under the federal ban without the ability to evict tenants behind on their rent.
