Another Person Loses Their Home To An Eviction Ban

While jailed and waiting execution, Roman philosopher Boethius wrote the Consolation of Philosophy in which he defined eternity as “the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment.” Perhaps he was also thinking about eviction bans that unfolded across the country two years ago which, in spite of billions of dollars in rental assistance being allocated by federal, state, and local governments persist. I wrote about one Chicago woman’s experience of the eviction ban in 2020. Sadly, two years later a similar story is ongoing in Seattle, a woman robbed of her home with no legal remedy.

Back in 2020, Katrina Bilella moved to Colorado for a new job and she decided to rent out her condominium in Chicago. Then Covid-19 unfolded and so did local bans on eviction across the country including Chicago. Bilella wanted to move back to her own apartment or at least she needed the rental income to help offset her costs. After the Chicago ban started, the people who she rented to stopped paying rent – and they had income. Bilella wasn’t interested in evicting anyone, but she needed to collect rent and eventually move back in. The ban made that impossible. Without rent income or a job, Bilella also found herself without a place to live. You can read her story here.

Two years later, in Seattle, Ayda Cader found herself in a similar situation. Cader bought a single-family home in Seattle but due to a work move, decided to rent it. She told me that she “never intended to rent it out for more than 1-2 years.” When she returned to Seattle in the midst of the Covid-19 eviction ban she found a tenant that had stopped paying rent in the fall of 2020. The tenant was also not communicating or responding. So far, she’s owed $45,000 in back rent and utilities and she estimates about $18,000 in damages for smoke damages (the tenant has been smoking in the house) and junk removal.

Meanwhile, Cader was forced to live with a friend along with losing rental income while still having to pay the mortgage on the house. The rent payments didn’t create any passive income because Cader rented the house for less than the mortgage. She had given the tenant a really good deal on rent. From the information she has been able to gather, she knows that the tenant

Meanwhile, Mayor Bruce Harrell has continued the eviction ban until the end of February. While that might seem to give Cader some hope, the Seattle City Council voted in 2020 to pass legislation that extends Covid-19 protections 6 months beyond the end of the eviction ban. Not only that, the Washington State Legislature passed legislation granting anyone facing eviction a free attorney. So, if Cader does move forward with an eviction action in March, her tenant can not only claim impact from Covid-19 as a defense with no substantiation, but he gets an attorney to help if that defense fails.

“The Seattle Mayor’s office has consistently ignored my pleas for assistance,” Cader says, “including requests to speak with the Mayor, or take any action to correct the situation.”

Without help from politicians, Cader also finds herself without regular recourse to seek relief from the courts.

“There is no recourse for small landlords to protect their home or enforce their contracts,” she says, a complaint shared by many housing providers in Seattle and across the Country.

There are three big problems here. First, there is no reason anyone impacted by Covid-19 should have any issues with unpaid rent. The Congress allocated $25 billion at the end of 2020 to help pay the rent. Yet, by most accounts that money hasn’t arrived or only partially arrived. King County where Seattle is located, just announced it ran out of money. If we had a curious media that would be a scandal. Where did all that money go?

Second, many housing providers have found themselves cut off from the courts, a basic American concept, so integral to our zeitgeist that everyone remembers the television show People’s Court: “Don’t take the law into your own hands; you take ’em to court.” Rent relief has always been the solution to lost income, but closing off due process means people in Bilella and Cader’s situation have zero options.

Finally, advocates of endless eviction bans thrive on chaos and misrepresentation. Why should there be eviction bans two years after the beginning of Covid-19 shutdowns when billions have been allocated for rent relief and when in places like Seattle where tenants have access to a free attorney. There simply is no basis or rationale other than creating the de facto basis for government control of private rental housing.

When the history is written and perhaps read years from now, I think there will be broad agreement: federal, state, and local governments played politics with people’s lives with eviction bans, failing to address real suffering among residents and housing providers. Until the public’s opinion about rental housing – that it is passive income – can be changed, this favoring of political solutions favoring interest groups rather than real people will continue to prevail.