The end of the pandemic may bring a flood of evictions in New Jersey. Experts weigh in on how we got here and what to do next
Last March, Dr. Norrinda Hayat organized her first Twitterstorm. An assistant law professor at Rutgers Law School and the director of the Civil Justice Law Clinic in Newark, Hayat rallied her students and online community to spend a day tweeting to halt evictions in New Jersey during the COVID-19 pandemic.
After having sat in on eviction court hearings in October of 2019 at the Essex County Courthouse, Hayat knew it wasn’t realistic to continue evicting people during the pandemic. “You know how packed it is, how many people are close together, how small the court is, how hot it gets,” Hayat said. “And then what are you going to do, turn these people out on the street?”
The day after Hayat’s Twitterstorm, Governor Phil Murphy enacted a temporary eviction moratorium✎ EditSign that prevented tenants from being removed from their homes as a result of eviction proceedings. Murphy has renewed the moratorium every month since then. During his monthly coronavirus briefing in March 2020, Murphy said the moratorium would keep tenants from being evicted during an economic downturn and a public health crisis. As the US entered its pandemic summer, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also instituted an eviction moratorium✎ EditSign at the federal level that applies to renters meeting specific criteria, such as having an annual individual income under $99,000 or being at risk for homelessness if evicted. While currently being contested in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the federal moratorium serves as a national minimum and doesn’t apply to states, like New Jersey, that have expanded protections and eligibility requirements.
Even with the state’s expanded moratorium, landlords in New Jersey are still filing evictions and tenants are being kicked out of their homes illegally, according to Nina Rainiero, Communications Director at the Housing & Community Development Network of New Jersey. Loss of income during the pandemic has made it difficult for tenants to keep up with rent payments and, while the moratorium temporarily halts evictions with rare exceptions for violence between tenants, backlogs of unpaid rent may lead to mass evictions once the moratorium is lifted.
“There’s still thousands of evictions that have been filed that are just waiting for the moratorium to lift and, once that happens, the floodgates are going to open,” Raineiero said.
America’s eviction crisis is nothing new, said Dr. Peter Hepburn, an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University-Newark. Experts say that in a normal year when the nation’s unemployment rate is below 5%, there are still roughly 4 million eviction filings across the country. In New Jersey courts, 151,920 tenancy actions were filed as civil claims between July 2018 and June 2019. But it can be difficult to track how many of these cases actually led to an eviction. Solutions will only work if we understand the problem, said Dr. Hepburn. And we don’t have a clear picture of the housing and eviction crisis in New Jersey.
While the pandemic has forced some of the records online, data on evictions in New Jersey is not well tracked, he said. “We know that there are a lot of filings each year, but we’re not sure how that translates into judgements and we’re not sure what’s happening during the pandemic,” he said. “Having the data makes a huge difference in whether, when, and what we can do.”
In Essex County, Hayat said the court was keeping boxes of paper eviction filing records in random rooms of the courthouse, which prevents the public from studying them. With hundreds of evictions happening every week prior to the moratorium and no one keeping track of them, it’s difficult to track who was being evicted, why, and by whom.
Not knowing where the eviction hotspots are in the state, makes it hard to determine where and how to best direct emergency funds during the pandemic, Hepburn said. Although local organizations are committed and trying their best, he said, they are under-resourced and each only know a small piece of the puzzle. County-led emergency rental assistance programs and local shelters like the Family Promise of Hunterdon County are some examples of groups currently taking applications for up to three months of emergency rental assistance for struggling tenants.
“Without more data and more guidance from the courts on what they’re seeing, we risk missing significant parts of what’s going on,” said Dr. Hepburn.
In New Jersey, emergency rental assistance has helped some tenants catch up on rent payments during the moratorium, according to housing justice advocates like Rainiero, though that assistance has not solved the problem. “I think the state has done a great job getting resources out,” Rainiero said. "But the need is tremendous.”
Prior to the pandemic, tenants and the housing market in New Jersey were still recovering from the 2008 recession and Superstorm Sandy. In 2020, the state ranked seventh in the nation for highest housing wage, an estimate of the full-time hourly wage a worker must earn to afford the average rental home, according to the 2020 Out of Reach Report published by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an affordable housing advocacy group. In New Jersey, workers need to make $29.69 an hour in a 40 hour work week to rent a modest, two-bedroom home. For minimum wage workers, this means having to work 108 hours a week.
The pandemic, said Rainiero, has only made the situation worse.
While the increasing lack of affordable housing for renters contributed to today’s housing crisis, the issue goes well beyond affordability and starts with a broken justice system and ineffective policies.
In October of 2019, Hayat and her students sat in on hearings for hundreds of eviction cases in Newark. They found that around 50% of people who were filed against for eviction were not showing up to court, a recurring pattern in jurisdictions like Washington D.C. and New York City. When Hayat and her students reviewed the court files, they learned that many of those who had been filed against had not even been served properly. In New Jersey, there is also no guaranteed right to counsel for tenants facing eviction.
Hayat’s group also studied the amount of rent tenants are alleged to owe and whether or not they should have been evicted in the first place. According to the Housing Authority rules for public housing, she said, individuals are only supposed to pay 30% of their income towards rent and utilities and landlords are supposed to accommodate for changes in income. While rental assistance policies exist, they don’t always meet the demand.
One example is the Housing Choice Voucher Program, the largest federal low-income housing assistance program. Through this program, eligible cost-burdened households receive a voucher that pays the difference between 30% of their income and the market rent. Households are eligible for the program if the family’s income does not exceed 50% of the median income of the area they live in. The law also requires 75% of all housing vouchers to go to families where their income is less than 30% of the area’s median income. But only a fraction of eligible households receive those benefits and some families wait up to ten years on the waitlist for the program, said Hayat.
“The way to make it enough is just to issue more vouchers,” she said. “If everybody whose income was below the certain level that makes you qualify had a voucher, then we wouldn’t be talking about the eviction tsunami.”
In that situation, Hayat said an eligible individual would only need modest assistance pre-pandemic and then the government could cover for the months that their income decreased. When their income goes back up, the government contribution would decrease, she said.
Housing issues in New Jersey are part of a long-term crisis, and policies like the eviction moratorium and emergency rental assistance are just short-term fixes, said Hayat. For people at risk of eviction, she explained, incomes were subject to large fluctuations before the pandemic, so existing policies only help a handful of people in need. The pandemic, she hopes, will spur policymakers to invest in longer term solutions like expanding the social safety net and reimagining the housing and eviction system.
“There are things that the court and others could do to change the trajectory of this,” she said. “We need the short-term solutions right now because we haven’t been doing the long-term work.”
