“We risk being deported”, confided, sunday 1er August, Samantha Pate and Andrew Martinez, residents of Aurora, Colorado, to KDVR TV channel. The couple, with two children, plan to settle temporarily on land they own. US politicians were still trying over the weekend to avoid these mass expulsions, which affect several million Americans in financial difficulty, after the expiration of a moratorium that protected them.
More than 10 million people in the United States are behind on their rent payments, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, an independent research institute, has calculated. Some 3.6 million tenants estimate that they risk being evicted within two months, according to a study by the statistics office, carried out in early July, among 51 million tenants.
Legislate urgently
It was Saturday, at midnight, that a truce on evictions expired, decided almost a year ago for health reasons linked to the Covid-19 pandemic, and renewed several times. The White House took parliamentarians by surprise on Thursday by ensuring that the health authorities could no longer, for legal reasons, extend this moratorium further, and by asking them to legislate urgently. What the elected officials did not manage to do before the House of Representatives ceased its work for the summer break.
The blockade sparked widespread criticism from the ranks of Democratic officials on Sunday. House of Representatives boss Nancy Pelosi and several other Democratic leaders have called on US President Joe Biden to extend the moratorium: it is a “Moral imperative” to prevent people from ending up on the streets, they said in a joint statement.
Democrat MP Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, criticized the Biden administration for waiting until the last moment to ask Congress to act. She insisted on the injustice there would, she said, to evict tenants, when several billion dollars in aid intended to at least partially solve the problem of unpaid rents have not been spent. “We cannot kick people out of their homes when our end of the bargain has not been fulfilled”, she lambasted on CNN.
CNN’s @jaketapper: Who’s to blame for the eviction moratorium expiring? Rep. @AOC: “There was, frankly, a handful… https://t.co/MZVaiC14Ua
Financial aid barely distributed
Earlier, Nancy Pelosi explained that, faced with the difficulties of urgently legislating on the moratorium, some Democrats “Decided to focus instead on how to get the money to tenants and landlords” planned in the measures taken in response to the pandemic, at the very beginning of Biden’s tenure. It is an envelope of 46 billion dollars, intended to solve, at least in part, the problem of unpaid rents, but the distribution of which is proving very laborious, in particular for reasons of bureaucracy. Thus, of the 46 billion dollars planned by the government, including 25 billion disbursed at the beginning of February, only three billion have arrived at their destination.
A handful of Democratic parliamentarians from the party’s most left-wing fringe also continued on Sunday to plead for a recall to Washington of members of the House of Representatives. “We want the House of Representatives to meet, the Senate can also intervene, the president could issue a decree, we must do everything possible”House of Representatives Jamaal Bowman, elected from New York, said Sunday morning on the steps of the Capitol to support a small group of young activists who spent the night there. “To deport people or to make their deportation possible in times of pandemic is inhumane”, he added.
The upturn in the US economy, which does not benefit all households in the same way, is pushing up rents. According to the latest score made by the specialist site Realtor, the median rent in the United States climbed 8.1% between June 2020 and June 2021.
