 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Today, we're joined by Yujit Puneer of Breakthrough News and we're going to be talking about the recent US Supreme Court judgment which struck down the ban on evictions that the Centers for Disease Control and the Biden administration had imposed recently. Now, this is going to have an impact on millions of people across the United States. So, Yujit will be talking about what exactly did happen and what is likely to happen. Thank you so much Yujit for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, honored to be here. Yujit, first of all, maybe if you could take our viewers through the judgment itself, exactly what did the US Supreme Court say and what was the logic it gave for shutting off, for striking down this ban at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic is really still intensifying in the US? Yes. Well, you know, many people were surprised at the judgment first and foremost because at the lower court level of judge that had previously ruled against a previous incarnation of the eviction moratorium had actually ruled in favor of this one. So, the issue that was at stake was whether or not the Centers for Disease Control can issue what is essentially a blanket ban on evictions. Now, it does have some caveats and different pieces like that. In particular, this time around, they added an element that was not in the previous eviction moratorium that was also tying your ability to claim that you cannot be evicted under this moratorium to the level of COVID-19 inside of the county in which you live. So, it was actually a more narrow moratorium than had previously been put into place. Now, all that being said, and despite the lower courts ruling again, the Supreme Court ruled in something that's actually known as the shadow docket, which essentially is where they decide the cases more or less overnight. They did not offer a ton of legal rationale behind it. The whole point of it is it's almost like they just kind of rubber stamp whatever their ruling is. But certainly what we know in terms of the Supreme Court's ruling is that they are saying not that you can't have an eviction moratorium, but that the White House and the federal government, the executive, does not have the power to just put in a blanket ban on evictions, even with these various caveats. That's something like that in terms of the separation of powers, which is what this is really all about. And that's why the jurisprudence is so strange, because the courts, the president, and Congress all have allegedly certain arenas in which they can and cannot act, and that this is outside of the ability of the president to intervene, and that, in fact, it infringes upon the property rights of those who have landlords to be able to take people's rents in order for them to have this kind of blanket ban. So essentially, they're saying if you want to have an eviction moratorium, the Supreme Court is saying then Congress has to pass a law outlining it and so on and so forth, but the government cannot just infringe on the rights of these property owners to take in this rent or to evict someone on the basis of non-payment or rent, which of course is illegal, right? You sign a contract saying that you'll pay the rent without, under these sorts of emergency powers. That's too broad, that it's too long, and that it's just not allowed. So that's pretty much what it really all comes down to, is the property rights of landlords are stronger than the rights of the president of the United States to declare a public health emergency and to prevent people from being evicted. And then there's sort of a subtext to that, that an eviction is not really a public health emergency. And that's sort of another piece of it that I think is smaller but important in many ways is that by saying this, because they're not saying that the CDC can't do public health emergencies, what they're saying is that an eviction in the context of a pandemic does not constitute something that will exacerbate a public health emergency, which in and of itself is significantly, it just makes no sense at all. I mean, there's so many ways we could obviously talk about that forever, but it does speak to also maybe a potential ripple effect of this, which is making it easier to legally challenge other aspects of public health controls around COVID-19. Now we haven't seen anything super aggressive in the courts on that front, but with the growth of ideas about mass mandates, vaccine mandates, and other pieces, this certainly also looms large in that regard. Absolutely. Eugene, we've of course seen the legal aspect of it, you explained it very well, but could you maybe also take us to what exactly is a human toll? Because the rents and eviction are an issue which is actually cropped across the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have seen protests, people's movement taking to streets, a lot of demands being made on the streets and in parliaments across the world. So in the context of the United States, how exactly is this likely to impact people? Well, the impact could be huge. I mean, many people are talking about it as a tsunami of evictions. There are, and one of the things that is maybe the scariest about it to many people is we really actually don't know how many people are affected by this, but it's a huge number. There are estimates, the best estimates I've seen is there are about 15 million people who could be at risk of eviction. Now to just give you some sense of that, in an average year in the United States, there are about 4 million eviction filings. Not all those people are not evicted, but there are 4 million potential evictions in a normal year in the United States. Now we're looking like we could have as many, if not more, at 15 million people who are subject to eviction. And that number can grow and change every day because there are multiple different factors, but people are still losing their jobs. They're still losing hours of employment to COVID-19. And so these numbers, as much as there has been relief in other pieces like that, could be underplayed. They could be a little overplayed, but it looks like certainly at least 15 million people are facing eviction. Another way to look at that is one in five children right now are living in a home that is behind on rent. There's actually one in three children are living in a home that is either behind on rent or other basic household expenses. But a huge number of children, millions and millions of children are absolutely at risk of potentially losing their homes. And if you're a single person, it might be a little bit easier to live with a friend or something like that. If you have a family, it's even more complicated. So you can see how there could really be a disproportionate impact on families in this eviction crisis, not that it's good for anyone to be evicted. Of course, it's a problem for everyone, but certainly it's even harder for families to find those kind of makeshift, sleep on a couch sort of arrangements, and certainly to make them work over longer periods of time. So the impact on this will be significantly disproportionate. And it's happening at a time where cities and counties and states are pulling back on the increase in homelessness services that had happened during the pandemic. So we saw things that really had people had called on for years that we'd never seen. For instance, here in New York City where I'm based, they were taking over hotels, putting homeless folks in hotels to get them off the streets. Well, they're now rolling that back in a huge way. And so we're in a country that doesn't have enough shelter capacity to deal with the number of homeless people that exist on an everyday basis. And that's a weird paradox about the United States. There's more empty dwellings than homeless people. But the fact of the matter is people own those dwellings, so you can't just put people in them in a capitalist society. So even though there will, in many ways, it's a fake problem to even have about homelessness, this eviction tsunami will even overtake the number of empty dwellings. We don't have anything like the number of homelessness services to deal with the roughly 600,000 people who are homeless at any given time at a normal moment. So you can see that there's no social safety net of any type that is set up to deal with the possibility of this many people being evicted. And it certainly could be many, many people. So you look at the impact of where we're going in terms of the time of year. We're getting close to the fall. We're getting close to the winter. Huge cities like New York, like Boston, even places like San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, I mean, the bitter cold, tens of thousands of people could be pushed out. But even where it's still relatively warm and relatively mild, we're seeing it here in New York State, the eviction moratorium that was stronger than the CDC moratorium is set to expire very soon in the beginning of September. There are states like Texas that already, we're already evicting people and then we're stopped by the renewal of the CDC moratorium or at least stopped to some degree. So we know that there are whole areas where they're teed up to potentially evict thousands of people in one day. So you just think about the impact of 15 million people, even potentially going out into the streets. And we're also talking at a time where school is just beginning here in the United States, which also means that not only are more children affected being homeless, but they're in effect of being homeless right at the time. They're going back to school in the context of all the extra stress that young people are facing, around masks, around all these different pieces because the vaccines haven't even been approved for some of the younger ages. So there's all these different factors, I think, that are compounding. And when you are a homeless person, you have less access to food. You certainly have less access to basic public services. If you don't have an address in the United States, it's very difficult to do something as simple as get a driver's license and other things you need to apply for public assistance. So on so many different levels, we're looking at millions and millions and millions of people who could be facing just total abject poverty being thrown out into the streets of the worst time of the year and obviously having so many other compounding problems that continue to come from that. Absolutely. It's interesting that there were the court did point to Congress, and so the Congress perhaps has the right to do so. So the real question often here is also that considering that we have a Democrat administration and that the party controls or at least can control both houses of Congress, why is it that there really hasn't been any attempt to actually get this passed through Congress? The only thing you can say, I mean, it sounds so wild to even hear is the political power of the landlords. And the landlords have many ways of operating. The one of the most powerful lobbies though in America is the National Association of Realtors, which even though it seems like it's about home ownership, not just rental, they really advocate on behalf of all private property owners receiving any income in any way, shape or form from housing. So anyway, that's, you know, and there's many others. There's the multifamily property association, others that have a lot of political power. They have a huge amount of political power on the local level, even bigger than the federal level. And they have been pushing against any form of eviction moratorium from day one, really. And what you're seeing in Congress in this regard is a denial of the scale of the problem in many ways. Congress has appropriated about $46 billion for rent relief, but there are so many hoops and hurdles and bureaucratic challenges. In most states, almost none of this money has been distributed. I think there's maybe only three states who have distributed over 50%. Many of them, you know, 20%. I think overall, I think it's actually less than 10%. I'd have to double check that, but you know, there's almost nowhere where any, in fact, there is actually literally only three states that have even a simple majority of the amount of aides and out. And most, it's, you know, less than a quarter. So, you know, ultimately, you have in Congress though, they're saying, oh, well, it's not a big of an issue because we've appropriated all this money and it's going to work its way through the system and it's all going to work out. But the fact of the matter is the eviction courts can move faster than the government to actually pay people's rent. And there are a lot of people who want to evict people, not necessarily because they need the money. The reason the housing market hasn't collapsed is the banks have been lending a ton of money to landlords because they know that the government ultimately is going to give this money to people to pay their rent, but it's because they want total control over their own property. And they want to be able to determine who stays, who goes, when they stay and how they go. And so a lot of the evictions are just designed as a power move by these landlords who could easily hold on, who could easily wait for the money. And they see an eviction moratorium as a totally indefensible infringement upon their right to make profit. And they feel regardless of whether money has been appropriated to pay people's rent or not, they should control how it works out. So they might not even evict you, but they want to be the one who can say, okay, you've applied for the money from the city and for the state. So we're going to let you stay here for another two months. Or you know what? We don't care. We're going to kick you out. They just want to ultimately be the arbiter of who stays, who goes, how they make profit and how to regulate it. And they have been very angered by the government stepping in and saying, look, in certain circumstances, the right to housing does override your right to own this property and to generate income from it. And that is the real reason Congress won't move. And because they've already appropriated the money, they're acting like it isn't really a problem. But you can see from the leadership of the Democrats, they are concerned about it, which is why they aggressively pushed Biden to reinstate it because they didn't want to have to take responsibility for bringing it up in Congress and for it losing. Because no one believes this could pass because there's such a powerful landlord capitalist lobby that views this as a big overreach by the federal government in the United States into disrupting the unfettered making of profit. Absolutely. And you did finally like we often end some of our interviews with obviously a lot of movements on the ground working on these issues. So maybe what are the major strategies like the movements right now are taking up to actually deal with the problem right now? Yeah. So I would say it's multi-fold. I would say some of it is bureaucratic. There are a lot of people who are going into overdrive to help people figure out how to file for this assistance because it's the best chip anyone has and if they have to negotiate with their landlord or if they have to go to court to say, listen, I've applied, I'm eligible, blah, blah, blah, give me a break. So that's one piece. That's a defensive piece. But there is a lot of that going on. I think that's also an important work. Part two is the second part of the defensive piece. And that is many organizations around the country are looking at strengthening the ability to physically defend against evictions. All around the country, there are people who are organizing and getting people to pledge to physically prevent people from being evicted. That means show up, when the cops show up to kick someone's out and move their stuff back in. Long history of that in the United States and the tenants' rights movement. Something we haven't seen that much of since maybe the early 1990s, but certainly something that has a lot of possibility. And there are many more people in the United States talking about that because the scale of the evictions is so broad. It may be the only way to really disrupt the process in a significant way. Third, though, there are a lot of efforts and these actually go back to the middle of the pandemic when there were some states that tried to evict a bunch of people against all odds. We've seen this in New Orleans. We've seen it in Kansas City and different places where people are trying to disrupt the proceedings of the eviction courts, chaining themselves to the doors to prevent them from opening. Other civil disobedience actions like that to try to just stop the machinery of the evictions on a day-to-day basis every day that they can't evict you is one day more to organize. And then finally, there are attempts by many organizations to raise the political demands towards the end of September. For instance, there's going to be a set of days of action, September 24th and September 26th by an organization cancel the rents. There are many things happening on the local level and the state level that are trying to raise either state level eviction moratoriums. You have to move the money through faster, just finding some political leverage point to try to prevent people from being evicted in huge numbers and to raise in a much bigger issue the idea of actually cancelling out people's rents at this stage in the game. It was $519 billion was all residential rent in America in 2019. That's less than the CARES Act. That's actually less than all three of the coronavirus relief bills. They could have gotten rid of everybody's rent. There's $1.3 trillion made by American billionaires in 2020 alone. That's another piece of the conversation people are also trying to raise that it really is a fake problem. We could easily take care of people's rents. There are plenty of empty dwellings for those who are homeless. We could actually address the issue of housing much more comprehensively if we so chose. It's just private profit that's stopping us. Always keeping that on the forefront and keeping it on the front burner I think is a big piece of it. Those four strategies together I think is a combination of the defensive and the offensive moves that I think a lot of people are now starting to focus on in a much bigger way here as it looks certainly very possible like there is not going to be any real strong protections for renters any time in the near future from eviction. Thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you so much for having me. That's all we have. Time for today keep watching People's Dispatch.