In the early morning mist, a police car broke in on a civilian road on the outskirts of Atlanta and stopped in front of a humble gray bungalow, and two sheriffs got out of the car and knocked on the door urgently. Jeffrey Jones, who was staying in the house, was overwhelmed by the rapid knocking on the door and looked at the door worriedly.
He didn't know what the sheriff was doing outside the door, but Jones was afraid it was the government officials who had expelled them.
Because, the Joneses have not paid the rent for this humble bungalow for a long time.
The couple quickly fell into a desperate situation after losing their jobs in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, and they applied for federal rental assistance, but county officials said they did not receive the necessary materials from the landlord and therefore could not process the Jones couple's application.
Mr. and Mrs. Jones didn't want to stay here, after all, without rent assistance, they would have to pay their rent from their weekly federal unemployment benefits.
At most, the couple received nearly five thousand dollars a month in federal unemployment assistance, but over time, the federal government reduced the amount of aid, and even recently stopped the payment of aid in many states.
After the amount of aid was reduced, the Joneses tried to find a new house to rent so they could apply for rental assistance. However, due to the successive "big water releases" in the United States, even in the furthest neighborhoods of the Atlanta suburbs, the rent of houses has soared wildly.
According to RealPage, the number of apartment rentals in the United States soared to 500,000 units in the second quarter of 2021, and the rental rate of ordinary homes also hit a record 96.9% in the summer! Behind the scenes of the soaring rental rate is the crazy growth of US rental prices - the new rents in the US in July rose by 17% compared with the same period last year!
To put it simply in terms of data – since the pandemic began, rents for long-term rental apartments in the United States have risen by an average of $150 to $1,580 by August.
Private homes will be much cheaper, but the upward trend is not far behind.
The reason why the US rental market has exploded, in addition to the soaring housing prices in the United States, is also because the demand in the market has increased greatly - before the new crown pandemic, 36% of households in the United States, more than 100 million people rented.
With the soaring housing prices, many Americans have carried out "house cash-out" at the "high level of the market" and joined the ranks of renters, trying to re-buy houses after house prices return to normal prices.
This has also led to an imbalance between supply and demand in the US residential rental market, and the rent of new contracts has risen sharply.
"We have nowhere to go." Mr. Jones is a little desperate, and the newly signed rent for a house in his neighborhood is already hundreds of dollars higher than it was before the pandemic began, not to mention that if he is evicted, his credit score drops, and few landlords are willing to rent to him.
This means that Jones and his wife, 2-year-old son, are no longer able to make a home in the area.
And even if an American applies for "rent assistance," it doesn't mean that everything is fine.
The federal rent assistance program is not only extremely cumbersome to apply for, but also has long delays.
Atlantica Properties, a real estate company with 200 affordable housing units in Atlanta, took months to receive its first aid — the U.S. government directly paid the business landlords to reduce the rent of tenants.
The shortage of rental housing has strengthened the position of landlords.
Because more and more large U.S. cities are building high-profit high-end housing and disdain for affordable housing, this has also led to low- and middle-income renters who have been facing the problem of rising house prices.
According to the Atlanta Regional Council. In 2019, nearly a quarter of the city's renters spent more than half of their income on rent.
Corporate landlords are more likely to evict tenants than individual landlords than individual landlords.
After all, capital is to pursue profits.
So, even if Jones and his wife can pay the rent on time, his landlord may try to evict him in every way - although the property has shown support for Jones to apply for rent assistance, the county government has no income, and whether there is catty in it is unknown to outsiders.
Zach Neumann, director of the Tenant Eviction Order in Colorado, put it bluntly: "Landlords seem eager to get tenants to move out so they can take advantage of the opportunity of the new contract and get higher rents." ”
Many U.S. landlords are deciding not to extend their leases and then raise rents beyond the affordability of existing tenants.
In a booming market, landlords are eager to rent out, while more and more tenants are being displaced.
It is not easy for tenants, but landlords also face their own difficulties.
Evictions also stopped because tenants defaulted on rent.
Paxton Baety rented out four single-family homes in DeKalb County, Georgia, all four of which were in arrears. The reduction in rental income, which forced him to use his retirement savings to pay property taxes and delay health care.
Fortunately, Betty at least didn't have the pressure to repay the loan.
The reason why the US government has successively introduced the "new crown bailout bill", and even recently the Democratic Party pushed for a $3.5 trillion "reconciliation bill", although there are radical political demands, can not avoid that these measures have indeed greatly improved the lives of the poor in the difficult period of the new crown pandemic.
Today, I don't want to think that the "unearned" aid is leaving more and more tenants and poor people in the United States homeless.
There are more than 10 million people in the United States who currently have "rent defaults," and 3.6 million people face eviction at any time because the U.S. Supreme Court of Justice rejected Biden's "Extension of Tenant Eviction Protection Order."
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