Just 10 days from an economic disaster

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium endss on June 30.
How many people will be evicted in the coming months is hard to say exactly, but it will be in the millions.

More than 10 million Americans, or 14% of U.S. renters, say they aren’t caught up with their housing payments, meaning many could be at risk when the national moratorium on evictions expires in under a month.

That finding comes from data collected by the Census Bureau between May 12 and 24 and analyzed by The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The CBPP also found that more than 26% of Americans continue to have trouble meeting their usual expenses, and around 9% couldn’t afford enough food.

The good news is that not every renter who's far behind on their rent will be evicted. This Harvard study says "only" 6 million will likely be evicted.
The bad news is that 2 million homeowners are in danger of losing their homes as well.

Now lot's of people may sympathize with the landlord, instead of the countless families about to be homeless. But at this point it's important to remember that this isn't the 1950's. The landlord may not be who you think.

Law enforcement agencies received some 450 eviction orders to carry out at Siegel Suites and Siegel Select properties last year...
Meanwhile, Siegel Suites collected over $2 million in federal rental assistance from Clark County, one of the largest amounts received by any landlord in the program’s first round of allocations. Las Vegas-based real estate firm The Siegel Group, which operates Siegel Suites, also received more than $3 million in federal Paycheck Protection Program loans.

Increasingly America's landlords are major corporations, who are getting government handouts, while kicking poor people into the streets.

In the midst of this catastrophe, Republican dominated states are rushing, months ahead of schedule, to cut off enhanced unemployment benefits.

Nine states will be ending their enhanced unemployment benefits on Saturday, cutting off aid to more than 440,000 out-of-work adults, according to an estimate from the left-leaning Century Foundation. The Republican governors of the states argue that the benefits aren't necessary as the economy recovers, but workers and advocates say the loss of benefits will harm them.

The states that are ending extra jobless benefits on June 19 include Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Indiana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming. They follow three states that eliminated their enhanced benefits a week earlier: Iowa, Mississippi and Missouri. Over the course of the next month, an additional 14 states will join these others in ending extra jobless benefits early. In total, 26 states will cut off pandemic aid before federal funding expires in September. Just one, Louisiana, is run by a Democratic governor.
...
About 14.8 million workers continue to rely on some form of unemployment benefits as their main source of income, according to unemployment expert Andy Stettner at the Century Foundation. Slightly more than 6 million of those workers are on Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), the program that provides aid to gig workers.

Most of the states that are cutting off the enhanced benefits are also stopping PUA and terminating the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation program. This is being done because of the Chamber of Commerce fake news reports that people would rather sit on their couches for $300 a month than work for starvation wages.
At least in Republican states, federal money is being cut off for millions at exactly the same time that a tsunami of evictions will hit. Democratic states will only be a couple months later.

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So while we are facing a future with tens of thousands of families living on the street, or in cars, consider the true state of housing in America.

The Census Bureau tracks the number of vacant homes in the U.S. on a quarterly basis and, as of October 2019, the number stands at about 17 million. That’s roughly 3.1 million more than the meme suggests. The last time the number of vacant homes was 13.9 million was in 2001, according to the Federal Reserve of St. Louis.
Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S.
Many of the vacant housing units on the market are homes that have been foreclosed and are now owned by banks, according to Business Insider.

Just so we're clear: This country has chosen to see it's children homeless, rather than reduce just a little bit of the profits of the upper class.
That really pisses me off.

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Why aren't we hearing more about this?

For example, nearly 1 in 4 renters are behind on their housing payments in Florida and South Carolina, compared with 6% in Maine and Kentucky, according to The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Across the country, Black renters are nearly four times as likely to be behind on their rent than white renters.

According to one recent count, more than 100,000 people over the age of 65 said they expected to be evicted within the next two months. Almost 450,000 renters between the ages of 55 and 64 said the same.

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it's becoming the default

The pandemic-caused recession and a federal requirement that states keep Medicaid beneficiaries enrolled until the national emergency ends swelled the pool of people in the program by more than 9 million over the past year, according to a report released Thursday.

The latest figures show Medicaid enrollment grew from 71.3 million in February 2020, when the pandemic was beginning in the U.S., to 80.5 million in January, according to a KFF analysis of federal data. (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF.)

That’s up from about 56 million in 2013, just before many states expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. And it’s double the 40 million enrolled in 2001.

Medicaid, once considered the ugly duckling compared with the politically powerful and popular Medicare program, now covers nearly 1 in 4 Americans. In New Mexico, the ratio is more than 1 in 3.

Together, Medicaid and Medicare cover 43% of Americans.

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@gjohnsit
It's designed to keep people poor.

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

Pricknick's picture

@The Voice In the Wilderness
An example is Michigan.

To qualify for Medicaid in Michigan, you must have no more than $2,000 in resources. Resources are assets like money and property. Some property does not count toward the resource limit. In Michigan, one car is exempt, and household goods are exempt. Your primary residence and any attached acreage is an exempt resource. However, if you need Medicaid for long-term care, then you cannot have more than $585,000 in equity in your home in 2019. Retirement accounts are counted as assets to the extent you can withdraw money from them.
https://www.nolo.com

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Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

@Pricknick
of course

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

Pricknick's picture

Everybody please support your local food bank.
Ours accepts money, canned goods, garden produce and love.
We need to help each other more than ever before.

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Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

Granma's picture

I don't doubt the figures you gave about empty houses, but where are those houses? From what I can tell, they are not in Oregon. Are they sort of clumped in some regions or scattered a few here, a few there. We have people living in motels since last summer's wildfires because there are no places for them to live until they can rebuild. If there were empty houses, they would certainly be renting them.

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@Granma

If there were empty houses, they would certainly be renting them.

Houses are being bought all-cash, very deep pockets, as places to park cash.
Consider that home prices went up 19% just last year. That's an impressive ROI without renting the house.

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

As others have said before, most people don't get politically mobilized until the rot starts reaching the bottom of their personal Maslow-pyramids.

As I've before, the fish rots from the head, and the above fact is arguably the single biggest problem with politics - if people only aimed higher, earlier, started acting like the supreme authorities that an American citizen is supposed to be, then shit would never have had a chance to roll downhill and the damage would've been minimized. I think I've mentioned that I'm a geography savant who, at the age of 8, could instantly name the capitol of nearly any country on Earth for the asking (gotten rustier since then, but still pretty good - watch the fuck out, Carmen Sandiego!), and I honestly wonder how different the world might be if only American schools emphasized geography rather than neglecting it.

ANYWAY, this is an incredibly dumb move on the oligarchy's part: The French Revolution began in earnest when mothers marched in the street with the second-most unlikely of history's great battle-cries: "BREAD!"

Of course, I say second-most because:

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!

@The Liberal Moonbat
I was pretty darned good at geography when I was young too.

I honestly wonder how different the world might be if only American schools emphasized geography rather than neglecting it.

People's ignorance of geography is mind-blowing to me.
But even more than geography, it's history that this nation badly needs.
If people were fluent in history then Identity Politics, of both the right and the left, wouldn't be so strong politically. Because people wouldn't so easily buy into the myths.

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The Liberal Moonbat's picture

@gjohnsit ...but I'd venture to say the best of them all is one I've never even met: Larry Gonick, author of the awe-inspiring Cartoon History of the Universe/Modern World series of graphic-novel history books, spanning the Big Bang to Gulf War II.

I CANNOT RECOMMEND THEM ENOUGH!: http://www.larrygonick.com/

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In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.

Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!