TOPEKA, Kansas — As many as 40 million Americans — including 357,000 Kansans — face the risk of eviction in the next several months.
An enhanced federal unemployment benefit of $600 a week that expired at the end of July helped people who lost jobs because of the COVID-19 pandemic cover basic living expenses, like rent and mortgage payments.
But a recent report from the Aspen Institute says that because Congress hasn’t extended those larger jobless checks, the country could soon see an unprecedented wave of evictions and foreclosures.
“America is facing an urgent and unprecedented eviction crisis,” the Aspen Institute researchers concluded.
Hundreds of thousands of Kansans could be at risk, said Donna Ginther, an economist with the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas.
“We need to understand that this (the pandemic) is a natural disaster,” Ginther said.
In a recent report, Ginther said the lapse of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Assistance — or CARES Act — is “compounding a crisis that is already terrible.”
“The federal government is playing with fire right now,” she said. “If those benefits aren’t restored, you’re going to see a lot of hardship and deprivation.”
Sheena Mooney, of Topeka, has already experienced it. She lost her janitorial job in March, fell behind on her rent and last week was evicted from her house.
“It’s my home,” Mooney said as friends helped her pack up her belongings. “It’s so hard, you have no idea.”
Mooney applied for unemployment but was told she didn’t qualify. So, her eviction wasn’t triggered by the loss of federal benefits.
It was approved by the Shawnee County District Court between the May 26 expiration of Gov. Laura Kelly’s initial order barring evictions and mortgage foreclosures and Aug. 17, when her new order took effect.
With Congress stalled on a new coronavirus relief package, Kelly announced last week that the state would apply to participate in a stop-gap Trump administration program to boost unemployment benefits by $400 a week.
In a statement, Kelly said using federal disaster relief funds to temporarily increase benefits to jobless Kansas is “far from a perfect solution.” But she said the program “is the only available option for additional federal assistance at this time.”
In recent testimony to a legislative committee monitoring the economic impact of the pandemic, Kansas Secretary of Labor Ryan Wright said he was reluctant to participate in the program because it would take “several weeks” to reprogram the agency’s decades-old-computer system to process the payments. Plus, he said, the $44 billion earmarked for the program isn’t expected to last long.
“What we’ve been told … is that we should only plan on three weeks of dedicated funding,” Wright said.
