When eviction moratoriums popped up all over the country at the beginning of the pandemic, they were billed as a temporary emergency measure intended to help stop the spread of COVID-19. But over the last year and a half, the rationales have multiplied—from arresting a public health threat to preventing a wave of evictions to buying time for billions in rental assistance (itself an unprecedented crisis-response policy) to reach beneficiaries.
This has been profoundly damaging in two important ways. First, at the state and local level, politicians have discovered a cheap, easy, court-supported way of providing economic relief. It’s unlikely that they’ll be less willing to use that power in the future. Thus, landlords’ fundamental right to decide who comes onto their property and under what conditions they stay there has been permanently eroded.
Second, at the federal level, there has been an unprecedented executive power grab. The CDC has claimed the authority to do anything “reasonably necessary” to stop the spread of a communicable disease. If that reasoning could justify an eviction moratorium to stop COVID-19, it could plausibly be stretched to justify any intervention in response to any transmissible disease, regardless of how severe it might be. Might a future administration impose an international travel ban to stop the common cold? Under the logic used to rationalize the eviction moratorium, that would seem to be an option.
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