Can we prevent a surge in pandemic-related homelessness?

“I don’t know what devil designed this maze,” a woman in Houston, Texas, said recently about the experience of being evicted in the midst of a pandemic.

Around the world, people whose livelihoods have been disrupted by COVID-19 now face the horrifying possibility of being cast out of their homes.

As many as an estimated 40 million Americans are at risk of eviction in the next several months, potentially marking the most severe housing crisis in the country’s history. In South Africa, impoverished residents of informal settlements are being evicted by private security firms. More than 1,700 families are believed to have been thrown out of their homes in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, during the crisis. Kenyan authorities have evicted more than 8,000 people from settlements in Nairobi. And at least 20,000 people have been evicted in India since March despite lockdown-related safeguards.

Frequently, the only things sparing people from homelessness have been government protections like eviction moratoriums. But many of these provisions have been less than comprehensive, and some are disappearing. For example, the patchwork of federal, state and local moratoriums in the US is rapidly expiring, while a pause on evictions in England and Wales is slated to end on 23 August.

A number of efforts have been made to track evictions during the crisis. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, for example, has gathered and visualized data on global efforts to protect and fight for tenant rights. According to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, more than 36,000 eviction cases were filed by landlords in the 17 US cities it tracks from the beginning of the pandemic through 15 August.

Even in places where protections have nominally been in place, evictions of workers hamstrung by the coronavirus proceeded – often targeting the most vulnerable, including unauthorized immigrants.

A national eviction moratorium in the US that was estimated to protect nearly one-third of the country’s rental units expired last month. However, it didn’t exempt tenants from paying rent – and left accumulated rent bills to be paid at a later date.

In Europe, a number of countries and cities have implemented anti-eviction protections deemed to be relatively strong. In Germany, for example, landlords have been prevented from evicting tenants unable to pay rent due to the health crisis.

Experts fear waves of homelessness in many parts of the world if more isn’t done to help people in need. Earlier this week, the UN’s expert on housing rights called on governments everywhere to halt all evictions until the pandemic ends.

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