Relief needed: Unpaid rents amassing pain on tenants, landlords, communities

People wait in line at a pop-up food pantry in Chelsea, Mass. Photo from NBC News by Erin Clark, Boston Globe.

Yes, another moratorium is protecting tenants from eviction — this one handed down nationwide by the Centers for Disease Control.

But the pain on Kansas City’s rental housing community is amassing all the same.

Without more financial relief, warn advocates for both tenants and landlords, evictions, foreclosures and bankruptcies will come falling down as from a burst dam when the current, inadequate pandemic protections give way.

Rental assistance agencies:

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“We project 300,000 Missouri families will be at risk of homelessness or eviction by the end of the year,” said Sarah Owsley of Empower Missouri, in one of two online conferences Friday — one by landlords, and one by advocates for tenants.

“Eviction,” Owsley said, “is a form of violence, before Covid and now.”

But many landlord groups are fighting against the moratorium, saying a blanket protection against eviction proceedings lays the financial burden of the pandemic on landlords, and does not in the long run help tenants whose rent obligations still remain and will saddle many with crippling debt.

“At the end of an eviction moratorium, nobody wins,” said Stacey Johnson-Cosby, president of the KC Regional Housing Alliance. “Not the landlords. Not the banks. And the tenants are the biggest losers.”

Both of the video conferences emerged with a common plea: More federal relief for rental assistance.

“Get the rental assistance up front,” Johnson-Cosby said, and “prevent the need for evictions in the first place.”

The now-expired federal CARES Act provided some rental assistance funding and several social service agencies in the area have funds to help tenants, but the funds are slow to come and are woefully inadequate for the amount of unpaid rents accruing across communities, speakers in the conferences said.

Tension continues to mount between landlords and tenants and the advocates on either side of the rent bill.

“Eviction filings have not stopped,” said Gina Chiala of the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom, and many landlords are pursuing evidentiary hearings to build cases to be able to take action against renters for reasons outside of their financial ability to pay rent.

Advice from landlords’ attorneys, including in Friday’s video conference, tells landlords to continue to file for evictions, seek hearings and “get in line” on court dockets.

“Landlords are in full defense-mode,” said Kalila Jackson of the Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council. The consequences of housing court actions against tenants leaves families “torn apart with no place to go.”

For landlords, the public outcry for tenants has the property owners feeling “under siege,” Johnson-Cosby said. Landlords are more vulnerable than ever in cases of irresponsible tenants who choose not to pay.

“People are seeing the faces of tenants,” she said, “but we’re struggling too.”

Trust is difficult between the groups of landlords and the advocates for tenants as they each lobby for local, state and federal action.

Landlords shared ideas on how to intercede more quickly when their tenants are in financial difficulty, watching for signs of trouble and then working with tenants to connect them to social services before they become unable to pay rent.

“You have to landlord harder than you’ve ever landlorded before,” said attorney Julie Anderson to the property owners in the conference. “You have to be social workers.”

But advocates with KC Tenants, watching the landlords’ conference, were tweeting on social media that the attorney’s advice was “callous and patronizing.” It was “explicitly about getting their money,” KC Tenants’ Tara Raghuveer said, “not actually supporting the tenant.”

On the tenant advocates’ conference, Chiala supported a call for increased federal rental assistance — but in collaboration with help from the landlords in forgiving portions of renters’ debts.

“We’re concerned (with rental assistance) that landlords get dollar signs in their eyes,” Chiala said. Landlords should forgive part of unpaid rents to help spread any government relief among more renters, so that the opportunity and the burden is more widely shared.

Without help, the burden on landlords will likewise have a long-term effect on the health of the community, Johnson-Cosby said.

There will be foreclosures, she said, particularly on many smaller, local landlords whose primary income is the rents they have to collect. The housing inventory will deteriorate further, she said, and more vacated properties will be bought up by larger, out-of-town investors.

Community and government support for renters needs to recognize housing as a human right, Chiala said.

“It’s undeniable the multiple impacts of the lack of housing on communities and the success of families,” she said. “We are traumatizing families.”

By Joe Robertson/LINC Writer