Protecting the Most Vulnerable: Policy Response and Eviction Filing Patterns During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic crisis exposed the U.S. rental housing market to extraordinary stress. Policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels established eviction moratoria and a number of additional direct and indirect renter-supportive measures in a bid to prevent a surge in evictions and associated public health risks. This article assesses the net efficacy of these interventions, analyzing changes in eviction filing patterns in 2020–2021 in thirty-one cities across the country. We find that eviction filings were dramatically reduced over this period. The largest reductions were in places that previously experienced highest eviction filing rates, particularly majority-Black and low-income neighborhoods. Although these changes did not ameliorate racial, gender, and income inequalities in relative risk of eviction, they did significantly reduce rates across the board, resulting in especially large absolute gains in previously high-risk communities.

Irreparable Damage: International Housing Rights and Local Housing Struggles in Rome after 2020

The recent interventions of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) to suspend evictions of tenants in Rome, Italy, allows us to shed light into the forthcoming social catastrophe caused by Italian housing policies, and into the new advancements of social movements for housing. As two scholar-activists involved both in research on housing and in political actions to prevent evictions, we describe how housing movements in Rome are facing the contradictions between local and international discourses on the right to housing.

Preparation of Two Participatory Social Housing Interventions in a Marginalised Roma Community in Romania

The first desegregation efforts in the marginalised and segregated communities in the Pata-Rât area were carried out within the frames of two social housing projects (between 2014–2017 and 2020–2023). Although a housing first methodology would have been more adequate in the context of a marginalised community, given the shortcomings of the Romanian social assistance system, implementation was impossible. In this context, it was necessary to develop a system to access social housing but also to create a reasonably ‘fair process' at the community level. Thus, in both interventions, the starting point for developing the social housing criteria was to survey the community in order to explore the community members' preferences regarding the criteria to be considered in the selection of the beneficiary families for the social houses. The surveys covered all the inhabitants of the Pata-Rât area, that is 219 households in the first survey and 282 households in the second. The survey results served as the basis for the development of the criteria for accessing social housing. In this article, we present and discuss the results of the community surveys from 2016 and from 2020, the year of the pandemic outbreak. Differences were found in the prioritisation of criteria, with an increasing preference for those reflecting vulnerability/needs (e.g., number of children, years spent in the community, disability) and decreasing preference for the ones indicating family resources (e.g., employment, income, education). These differences reflect the increase in poverty and loss of resources occurring in the community during this period, due both to the COVID-19 pandemic, and to the relocation of the 35 better-off families in the first Pata-Cluj project.

The Configuration of a Multi-Pronged Housing Movement in Barcelona

The housing movement that emerged in Spanish cities during the 2007–8 global financial crisis has undergone various mutations. If at first it was led by the anti-evictions fight of the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) and the housing groups of the 15M mobilization cycle (2011–14), the successive rent crises since 2013 and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–22) have given rise to new activist expressions—housing/neighborhood unions (sindicats d'habitatge / de barri) and a tenants' union—in metropolitan areas such as Barcelona. These have played a central role in housing organizing during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article we investigate the development of the housing/neighborhood unions while understanding their relationships with other housing groups in Barcelona. We first aim to know if, how, and why they have adopted, modified, or replaced the protest repertoires used by the PAH and the tenants' union and, second, to what extent the local housing movement in Barcelona evolved into a more diverse and multi-pronged configuration. Our findings indicate significant divergences between these housing organizations but also a common and complementary field of activism that eventually proved to be resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Housing Squats in the Pandemic: Viale delle Province 198

The twin buildings located in Viale delle Province 198 used to be the administrative headquarters of the National Institute of Social Protection (INPS) in Rome, then left vacant since the acquisition by the real estate fund, Investire SGR. It was squatted in 2012 by hundreds of families in a condition of housing vulnerability with the political and logistical support of the Blocchi Precari Metropolitani, that are part of the local Housing Rights Movements. Given its layout and central location, Viale delle Province 198 has become a hub of autonomous infrastructures of the welfare and contentious politics from below, with a strong focus on healthcare. This vocation has been highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic, whose unforeseen challenges compounded pre-existing patterns of exclusion. On the one hand, the activists, inhabitants and local social workers have engaged to consolidate the social innovations that have been devised since the onset of the pandemic. On the other hand, they and their solidarity networks are coalescing to cope with the repercussion of the eviction procedure that started during the summer 2022, and that would cause the dissolution of the autonomous infrastructures they have generated.

"Housing Is a Human Right”: Moms for Housing's Black Feminist Politics of Shelter

In the midst of the global SARS-CoV-2 epidemiological crisis unfolds another contagion: the eviction epidemic. This essay attends to the work of Moms for Housing, an organization of formerly homeless and marginally housed Black mothers in Oakland, California who have organized to confront dispossession, real-estate speculation, and the privatization of housing. Using Black feminist and queer of color intellectual frameworks as ciphers through which to interpret and properly attribute weight to the organization's activism, the essay argues that Moms for Housing not only offers potential flightlines toward a post-property future—one in which housing is positioned as a basic human right—but also a generative critique of the home as a site of racialized and gendered subject formation. Indeed, through their work, the reconception of kinship formation and territorial formation are understood to be mutually constitutive, abolitionist projects.

Necropolitics and the Covid-19 pandemic: evictions and removals that mark the recurrent housing problem in Brazil

This work aims to reflect on the impacts of COVID-19, a disease responsible for the pandemic worldwide status in 2020, on urban housing policies in Brazil, which has faced structural problems since the turn of the century. These problems were accentuated and evidenced with the onset of the pandemic. The paper sought to highlight the dismantling scenario and the setbacks of human rights that are expressed in the manner in which the federal government behaves in the face of the collapse caused by the health crisis. In addition to highlighting that, the housing problem has been sewn with patches that are not effective to supply the gigantic demand for housing in the country currently, besides they do not guarantee the security of tenure to the majority of families in socioeconomic vulnerability. In this context, the focus of the discussion is on the removals and evictions that have occurred during the pandemic, putting at risk an entire population historically neglected by the neoliberal policies of capitalism. Moreover, these policies have been accentuated as a reflection of the recent democratic inflection in the country, which has strongly threatened human and social rights, legitimized by necropolitics, during the pandemic (Mbembe, 2018). The text is presented as a theoretical study carried through an exploratory methodological structure, based on a bibliographic review and documentary analysis of the subject matter. This article does not intend to bring conclusions or final answers, but to present new elements for the debate on the dismantling of Brazilian housing policies, evidenced in the current scenario through the lack of access to decent housing or difficulty in keeping it, mainly for the lowest-income populations. © 2023, Eduem - Editora da Universidade Estadual de Maringa. All rights reserved.

THE MAJOR QUESTIONS QUARTET

Sohoni discusses the court cases Alabama Ass'n of Realtors, National Federation of Independent Business, Biden v. Missouri, and West Virginia v. EPA. In the CDC case, the Court held that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lacked authority to impose a nationwide moratorium on evictions in order to combat the spread of COVID-19. In the OSHA case, the Court held that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration lacked authority to compel large private employers--those with a hundred or more employees--to require that their employees be vaccinated against COVID-19 or else take weekly tests and wear masks. In the CMS case, decided the same day, the Court held that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services had authority to mandate that facilities receiving Medicare or Medicaid funding require their staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Decolonising Myself: Navigating the Researcher-Activist Identity in the Urban South Pacific

This paper charts my path from observer to action researcher – and my ex post realisation that a transition had happened in my work. This transition happened on the fly, in the field, without me critically reflecting on it at the time, while I was studying evictions in Port Vila, Vanuatu, South Pacific. My ethics came into direct conflict with my research approach, and I chose to change my approach. I theorise my transformation in the modernity/coloniality literature and close by offering strategies to students and other researchers who are looking for ways to engage more deeply with, and give something back to, the communities they study.

Ending Homelessness and Advancing Health Equity: A Public Health of Consequence, March 2022

In parallel, pressing questions for public health advocates, policymakers, and community members seeking to end homelessness will include determining which populations to prioritize for intervention and what interventions will yield the most benefit to intervene on this critical driver of health inequity. [...]there are sufficient resources to end homelessness in the United States, communities will struggle with howto allocate limited homeless services. [...]begins the editorial by Shinn and Richard in this issue of AJPH (p. 378), describing, in the absence of necessary resources, which metrics communities can consider employing to determine how homeless services ought to be allocated. Rather, a comprehensive federal housing policy that provides multilevel solutions to ensure long-term housing support is necessary to narrow the racial and sociostructural inequities in homelessness.3 Long-term and sustainable change requires overhauling local eviction laws in states that have highly punitive eviction policies, enacting rent control in urban neighborhoods where housing prices have increased dramatically and far outpaced low- and middleincome wages and increased tenant protections, and significantly expanding housing vouchers as well as greater investment in affordable housing stock to make housing available for individuals and families.

Evictions, Foreclosures, and Global Housing Speculation in Palma, Spain

Over the last two decades, the property bubble and the subsequent economic crisis and post-crisis policies have heightened urban inequalities, mainly in cities in southern Europe. The gaps between social classes have widened with the configuration of new urban spaces characterized by segregation and exclusion. Palma is the capital of one of the top tourist destinations in the Mediterranean (the Balearic Islands) and it is usually regarded as a successful tourism model and a land of opportunity for property investors. Nevertheless, serious problems of inequality exist in the city. The centre of this dual city is split between a process of spreading gentrification and the urban blight of its poor neighbourhoods. Son Gotleu is a particular case in point. The neighbourhood is home to a large number of social housing blocks (1960s) with residents from mostly migrant backgrounds. Within a global context of new redefined rent-seeking mechanisms, this article analysed impoverishment in Son Gotleu, based on three variables associated with housing: evictions, foreclosures and the property market. Our study shows that evictions were a determining feature of impoverishment, linked to the emergence of new speculative investment interests. Indeed, investment funds are very probably the most influential urban agents today.

Housing Policy Recommendations for the Biden/Harris Administration

Housing policy has taken on a heightened profile in recent years, and especially in the wake of COVID-19. Rents have increased faster than renters’ incomes, while Black homeownership has declined. And COVID-19 has hit renters, especially lower income ones, particularly hard, with many unable to pay their rent and facing possible eviction. Of course there are pressing needs that the Biden–Harris administration will need to address in its first 12 months concerning the pandemic, including the effective deployment of rental assistance, ensuring that well-designed mortgage forbearance is made available to all homeowners who would benefit from it, continuing and improving the eviction moratorium, and providing funding to high-capacity nonprofits and local governments to acquire distressed properties and preserve them for affordable housing. The High-Cost Cities Housing Forum (2020) has detailed many of these short-term policy needs. The focus here is on longer term, fundamental housing policy issues that, although brought more into the light by the pandemic, mostly preceded COVID-19.

Financialization of housing from cradle to grave: COVID-19, seniors’ housing, and multifamily rental housing in Canada

This paper explores the links between housing, financialization, and inequality—as exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses specifically on seniors’ housing (retirement and long-term care homes) and purpose-built rental housing, exploring how government cuts and retrenchment in the late 1990s created an opportunity for private profits for financial investors in housing that catalyzed a dramatic rise in “financialized” ownership of care homes, retirement properties, and multifamily rental housing in the province. Financial business strategies then generated a series of crises exacerbated by COVID-19. In rental housing, a crisis of affordability has led to displacement pressures and a COVID-related flood of evictions. In seniors’ housing, a crisis of care has been exposed by disproportionate deaths in long-term care and retirement homes nationwide. In Ontario, COVID-19 death rates were highest in financialized and corporate-owned for-profit homes, pointing to the downsides of prioritizing investor profits over housing, good jobs, and high-quality care. This paper is part of the SPE Theme on the Political Economy of COVID-19.

Malta ∙ Contract Extensions, the Covid-19 Pandemic and Interim Injunctive Measures by Incumbent Concessionaires: Water Leisure Limited et vs Transport Malta

The injunction is interim in nature, and therefore, the law requires that the claimant shows that these three requisites exist on a preliminary (prima facie) basis on the face of the documents before the Court. [...]in principle, the evidentiary burden to be satisfied by the claimant is lower than that required in a trial on the merits. [...]the Plaintiff claimed that it had carried out a number of investments in the area over which rights were granted with the expectation that it could exercise the right of first refusal in due course. [...]the Plaintiff claimed that the Contracting Authority was treating economic operators in the same category differently and that it was entitled to be granted an extension on the premise that others were. In particular, the Contracting Authority emphasises that the Contract expressly stated, in clear and unambiguous terms, that: (i) the duration of the Contract was until 30 September 2020;and (ii) the Contract ‘shall not be renewed or extended, neither shall a new [Contract] be signed with the Operator, on the expiry or termination thereof’. [...]on this basis, from a purely prima facie perspective on the face of the documents before the Court, the Plaintiff did not have a right at law or contract for the extension as a result of Covid-19.