The new eviction ban the CDC announced Tuesday is scheduled to last until Oct. 3 andappliesto counties experiencing high levels of community transmission of Covid-19. | Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
According to the 2020 report America was approximated to have an increased risk of eviction due to the COVID-19 housing crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the historical racial inequities in housing security, unfairly affecting renter households and bringing the risk of housing uncertainty and evictions into complete relief.
Eviction does not affect everyone equally, according to statistics many Black families are more likely to rent, rather than to own their homes, and to pay a larger share of their incomes when they do rent. They also tend to strain financially to cover emergencies. During the pandemic, many Blacks lost their jobs more than Whites, and the high percentage of the black renters in this country have struggled to make rent after losing income during the pandemic which led to the eviction. Black renters, particularly Black women, are more likely to be evicted than white renters.
Low-income tenants who are displaced are generally forced into low–quality housing in poorer and higher-crime neighborhoods. Evictions cause psychological trauma, increase the likelihood of suicide, increase emergency room usage, decrease credit access, and lead to homelessness. This problem is especially traumatizing for children, impacting their emotional, social, and physical well-being, and increasing the likelihood of lead poisoning, food insecurity, and issues with academic performance.
Indiana is among other American cities with the highest number of black living. We have a story of Harris a mother of four who was affected by eviction during the pandemic. She’d been living in her home at Chevy Trailblazer since she contracted Covid-19, fell behind on her rent and was evicted from an apartment in September. Her four children, ages one to 13 years old, were split around Indianapolis, with three away and living in various homes, and her youngest by her side. Since their eviction, Harris had packed most of her family’s belongings into a storage unit. The rest resided in plastic bins stacked carefully in the back of her trunk. President Joe Biden’s extension of the federal eviction moratorium save many blacks from being displaced from their homes since last year in August.
Today, many Indiana residents call the east side of Indianapolis a predominantly Black part of town “the desert” or “the gate.” On the east side, there are no grocery stores, said Dee Ross, founder of the Ross Foundation, an organization that oversees the Indianapolis Tenants Rights Union, which fights against housing injustices throughout the city. The area is bereft of banks or transportation to get to the west side of town, where most of the well-paying jobs are. The CDC’s most recent system extended the eviction moratorium through July 31, 2021, preventing the eviction of tenants who are unable to pay their rent, and was intended to be the final extension of the moratorium.