“Safe, stable, and decent housing has always been central to ensuring health and stability. Today, with the United States focused on containing the COVID-19 pandemic, the broader and longstanding issue of income and housing insecurity has quickly become paramount to the health of an entire nation.
As a stopgap measure, state and local governments, as well as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), have issued partial emergency eviction and foreclosure moratoriums to prevent families and individuals from losing their homes during the COVID-19 outbreak. These emergency measures vary greatly in form and degree of protection. While some of the moratoriums block evictions today, the vast majority still allow for widespread eviction as soon as state and federal emergency declarations expire. To prevent the deleterious health consequences of eviction and an escalating economic crisis, states are beginning to pursue strategies to ensure safe, decent, and stable housing during and after the pandemic.
To better understand the steps states have taken to prevent homelessness during and after the pandemic, the Eviction Lab and Columbia Law School’s Professor Emily Benfer have developed a policy scorecard for each state, distilling the contents of thousands of newly-released emergency orders, declarations, and legislation into a clear set of critical measures included in, and left out of, state-level pandemic responses related to eviction and housing.”
For more information: https://evictionlab.org/covid-policy-scorecard/
Anonymous on April 23, 2020