Eviction Notice

 

Photo by Sarah Reingewirtz, via Los Angeles Daily News.

What's with the CDC moratorium on evictions, which will allow renters to delay paying their landlords between now and 31 December, under certain conditions (they have to earn less than $99,000 for single income or $198,000 for couples, and they have to sign a statement saying they can't afford to pay and would be forced by eviction into homelessness or congregate housing)?

On the one hand it sounds like establishing a really important and somewhat radical disease control principle, that homelessness isn't just a social justice problem but also a public health problem—

“In the context of a pandemic, eviction moratoria — like quarantine, isolation, and social distancing — can be an effective public health measure utilized to prevent the spread of communicable disease,” the CDC’s unpublished order said.

—and on the other hand a really profoundly stupid way of doing it, since there's no rent forgiveness: the tenants, up to 40 million of them, will just be getting four months further in debt, and forced on 1 January to work out a plan to pay the money back or get evicted after all, leaving the landlord, and that includes 10 or 11 million mom and pop landlords renting an average of two properties apiece, possibly out for the four months, with unchanged utility and tax bills and mortgage payments, and uncompensated. Unlike in the previous moratorium proclaimed in the CARES Act, which offered (only for properties under federally-backed mortgages) support for unpaid rent from the local height of the pandemic in April through July.

Which is of course the problem: Congress is now unable to act, because Mitch McConnell won't do anything until Trump tells him to, and Trump's people don't like the Maxine Waters Emergency Housing Protections and Relief Act, allocating $100 billion to the problem and passed by the House in June.

A clue to what's going on is the way it was announced, not by the CDC or the White House (though it's an executive order), but by treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin (who just happens to have gotten filthy rich on thousands of evictions himself, as the former "foreclosure king" CEO of OneWest Bank), in a hearing with Waters's Financial Services Committee on Monday, where he was apparently reopening the negotiations that broke down early last month between the administration and the House on that second stimulus plan. What the CDC order does is to put on some pressure, I guess, toward getting it done (Mnuchin is a bad man, but a good negotiator, and he's increasingly looking to me like the last competent person in the cabinet), and a sign, perhaps, that he's serious. But the thing itself is not serious, and I'll bet it's not going anywhere except to the extent Congress gets engaged.

As to eviction and homelessness being a public health issue, that's long been a CDC position (like the view, hated by congressional Republicans, that gun violence is a public health issue), as in this put out in March 2017, when it was still a relatively independent agency:

On any given night, hundreds of thousands of people are homeless in the United States.1 These people might be chronically homeless, have temporarily lost their shelter, be fleeing domestic violence, or facing any number of other issues.2 Homelessness is closely connected to declines in physical and mental health; homeless persons experience high rates of health problems such as HIV infection, alcohol and drug abuse, mental illness, tuberculosis, and other conditions.3 Health problems among homeless persons result from various factors, such as barriers to care, lack of access to adequate food and protection, and limited resources and social services.4 As each of these factors have legal underpinnings, legal and policy interventions have often been used to attempt to address homelessness, although not always from a public health perspective.

But it's not a position that is likely to endear itself to Republicans, calling for interference in the free market and, you know, helping people with taxpayer money. Whichever bureaucrat in Atlanta managed to sneak it into Mnuchin's toolbox deserves congratulations.

Literary Corner: Decompensation

Our emperor,  crumpling into tears as he thinks about how "nice" he is and how misunderstood and getting whisked out of the room.

Sorry to interrupt, but how are all not talking about @axios airing an interview with Trump where he’s quickly yanked from the room because he *starts to cry*? pic.twitter.com/ItXewP9lsS

— Justin Yandell (@ShotgunZen) June 3, 2019

The speed with which the handlers react suggest this is something that's happened more than once.

The strangest and most colossal moment in the Tucker Carlson interview was the extended riff on the homelessness issue, which he seemed to think had first become a problem shortly after his inauguration ("a scene that nobody would have believed possible three years ago"). Not that he was taking responsibility for it; on the contrary, he suggests he "quickly" put a stop to it in Washington when it was "starting to happen" (which isn't true, as you might imagine; it happens to be true that the homeless population in DC has been declining significantly for the past three years, but the credit generally goes to Mayor Muriel Bowser and the family-oriented plan she introduced in 2015; Trump's budgets, meanwhile, work to eliminate one of the organizations that has done the most in the capital, the Interagency Council on Homelessness—not that Trump would know anything about that, it's one of Mulvaney's numerous jobs, but still).

Mr. Sandman

Photo by Walker Evans for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941, of folks being taken care of by the intimate, affectionate local authorities, free from the burdens of one-size-fits-all federal regulations.

Meanwhile, breaking news from Dreamland, where David F. "Sandman" Brooks has come into a fresh supply of that classic Russell Kirk sand to sprinkle into our stinging eyes ("The Localist Revolution"):

Localism is the belief that power should be wielded as much as possible at the neighborhood, city and state levels. Localism is thriving — as a philosophy and a way of doing things — because the national government is dysfunctional while many towns are reviving. Politicians in Washington are miserable, hurling ideological abstractions at one another, but mayors and governors are fulfilled, producing tangible results.

Bill de Blasio says thanks for the endorsement, but are you sure that's what you meant? There's no question but that the federal government is dysfunctional and has been since the 2010 midterm election gave the House of Representatives to the Republicans and reduced the Democrats' majority in the Senate from an almost-functioning 57 to a wholly impotent 51, and the conservatives began to use their renewed power, as they always will, to demonstrate the hypothesis that government can't do anything. And no question but that in some localities people are coping with losses in federal funding in creative ways. Good for them! But there are other localities where they aren't, lots of them, as always, where local elites refuse to help, because they want to hang on to their money. A lot of them are in what they call "Trump country".

Occupy Sanity

Occupy Sanity, by Davidhg, on Flickr.

From The Troubador at Daily Kos, who adds:

Words fail.

However, organizations like Occupy Our Homes aren't failing. Every day people in the Occupy movement are fighting big banks to keep families in this country from being foreclosed upon. Fighting to keep another person from being homeless, and from another housing unit becoming vacant. Fighting to change the narrative, to make this national blight more visible, more known.

And that's what spreading the above image can do. Make this injustice more known or understood in a way the mind-numbing statistics cannot, perhaps inspiring others to get up and do something with this newly-understood knowledge.