More than 30 million people have applied for unemployment as of April 30, as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Many are falling behind on their rent and are being evicted, despite new rules designed to stop evictions. Experts say the moratoriums by state and local officials don't go far enough and are leaving tenants vulnerable.
"My main concern is that I'll be evicted," says David Perez. The self-employed father of one sells artisanal wares, like wallets and sandals, at a flea market in Elkridge, Md. "What's going to happen to my family?" National Activists Refuse To Pay Rent As New York Struggles With The Coronavirus Outbreak
Perez hasn't had any income since the end of February because the flea market closed, and he says that he and his 14-year-old daughter are living off food donated from his church. He has already lost his van because he couldn't make his monthly payments.
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More than 3.4 million homeowners are temporarily skipping their mortgage payments because they've lost income during the pandemic. Under the CARES Act rescue package passed by Congress, affected homeowners can skip or delay payments for up to a year.
Jasmine's husband Frank Gullo works for the Long Island Rail Road, which cut back his hours. Even with Jasmine's unemployment money, the couple says they're still making thousands of dollars less a month. So they called up their lender, Freedom Mortgage.
"They told me, yes, you can skip three months' payments," Frank says. "But then they told me there was a balloon payment at the end of it." He was told after three months, they'd have to come up with all the money for those skipped payments. So they'd suddenly owe four months of mortgage payments all at once — $14,000.
Many unemployed tenants won’t be able to pay April rent. There will be a domino effect on landlords, real estate industry officials said.
I think we are only starting to see how deep the economic abyss may become in the coming months.
American homes are a lot bigger than they used to be. In 1973, when the Census Bureau started tracking home sizes, the median size of a newly built house was just over 1,500 square feet; that figure reached nearly 2,500 square feet in 2015.
This rise, combined with a drop in the average number of people per household, has translated to a whole lot more room for homeowners and their families: By one estimate, each newly built house had an average of 507 square feet per resident in 1973, and nearly twice that—971 square feet—four decades later.
"Promoting homeownership as an investment strategy is a risky proposition. No financial advisor would recommend going into debt in order to put such a massive part of your savings in any other single financial instrument—and one that, as we learned just a few years ago, carries a great deal of risk. Even worse, that risk isn’t random: It falls most heavily on low-income, black, and Hispanic buyers, who are given worse mortgage terms, and whose neighborhoods are systematically more likely to see low or even falling home values, with devastating effects on the racial wealth gap."