Housing advocates are pushing for similar action across the country. (April rent, obviously, isn’t the only challenge-many people are likely to also be unable to work in May and perhaps in June, and may struggle to find jobs when businesses reopen.) In California, the governor could temporarily cancel rent through emergency powers, and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors issued a resolution this week asking the governor to act the Seattle City Council passed a similar resolution. In New York, a state bill that would provide rent cancellation for 90 days is under consideration. Paul, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, and Seattle joined Haney and fellow San Francisco supervisor Hillary Ronen to argue that governments need to support rent cancellation. In a press conference today, city council members from Boston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, St. Even if their jobs start again, it would be nearly impossible to pay for several months of back rent on their old salaries. We’ve all seen the data of how many Americans are ‘rent-burdened’-they’re paying more of their income than they should be-in order to leave enough money for food and medication and other things.” Roughly half of the renters in the country are rent-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent. “The reality we have to face for so many millions of folks across the country is that they are living almost paycheck to paycheck,” says Peter Cohen, codirector of the affordable-housing organization Council of Community Housing Organizations. Many of those who are most affected by the coronavirus crisis, because they don’t have desk jobs that can be done remotely, were already struggling to pay bills in low-paying retail or service jobs. that will mean a huge increase in evictions and homelessness at the very time that we’ll be trying to help everybody recover.” And yet they’re facing a massive increase in debt. They’ve done nothing wrong except follow the rules. Many people have been put out of work entirely, and many of those folks simply don’t have money to pay their rent. “People are being told they have to stay home. “The eviction moratorium is important, but it’s clearly not enough,” says San Francisco supervisor Matt Haney.

Now, many people are calling for state and federal officials to cancel rent and simultaneously put a moratorium on evictions. But those measures only mean that renters won’t immediately be kicked out-they’ll still have a growing pile of debt in the form of rent they have to pay back later, with no clear sense of when it will be possible to work again.

Several cities have eviction moratoriums in place, and properties with FHA-backed mortgages are also temporarily protected from foreclosures and evictions.

Compu sketch