Biden Administration Reverses Itself, To Issue New Eviction Moratorium
In a move the White House had previously said they had no legal authority to do, the Biden Administration is preparing to issue a 60-day eviction moratorium to replace the just-lapsed CDC directed one.
The Biden administration is expected to announce a new action to limit housing evictions, moving swiftly after intense pressure from liberal House Democrats, according to three people aware of the matter.
The exact details of the measure were not clear, the people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect a matter not yet made public.
The congressional pressure campaign intensified in recent days after a national eviction moratorium created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expired at the end of July. The Biden administration has repeatedly insisted that it lacked the legal authority to renew that program. However, the delta variant has renewed concerns about the impact of the expiring moratorium on millions of renters, leading House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and other Democrats to push the administration to act unilaterally.
The CDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A White House spokeswoman also declined to comment.
The measure is expected to be announced by the CDC. Two people familiar with the matter said that officials have discussed extending the moratorium until Oct. 3, although they cautioned details may be subject to change. The new action is also expected to primarily protect renters in areas most hard hit by covid-19, the people said, although details of that provision were also unclear. The protection could be designed in a way so that it covered as much as 90 percent of the country, one of the people briefed on the matter said.
White House officials said as recently as Monday that there was nothing more that could be done legally to extend the eviction moratorium.
“On this particular issue, the president has not only kicked the tires; he has double, triple, quadruple checked,” Gene Sperling, a White House official helping to coordinate the response to the pandemic, told reporters on Monday. “He has asked the CDC to look at whether you could even do targeted eviction moratorium — that just went to the counties that have higher rates — and they, as well, have been unable to find the legal authority for even new, targeted eviction moratoriums.”
The rift between the White House and House Democrats over the expiration of the eviction moratorium had escalated earlier Tuesday as Pelosi ruled out bringing lawmakers back from their recess to address the issue through new legislation.
On a private call with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and House Democrats, Pelosi said the consensus of the caucus was that the House should not come back from its recess and that lawmakers should focus on urging the Biden administration to extend the moratorium unilaterally, two people familiar with the conversation said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a discussion that was meant to remain private.
Pelosi’s comments sent a clear signal to the White House that Congress was not going to act and that it would be up to the Biden administration to take unilateral action on evictions.
The Biden administration had previously said it did not have the legal authority to extend the CDC moratorium, and last week began pushing Congress to vote on a new measure. The measure was almost certain to fail in the Senate, given that Democrats would need 10 Senate Republicans to support the effort to overcome the filibuster. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Tuesday made clear that he did not see the need for more congressional action.
Somebody really needs to come with an endgame on this, because this is one can that can not be kicked down the road over and over again.Report
Within a week, we get Biden’s Pearl Harbor moment, wherein (I assume) he will blame the 30% of Americans who have not yet been vaccinated for the forthcoming lockdowns.
Nevermind that 70% jabbed is generally enough to get herd immunity (particularly with low R0,and 8 is still low compared to measles). [And that substantial numbers of the rest have natural immunity that lasts longer than the jabbed.]
Within the month, we get lockdowns in all blue states.
This will keep on getting kicked down the road.
(I am hoping that I can get vaccinated when novavax comes out).Report
First off, claiming anything has a low R0 by comparing it to measles is basically you hoping your audience is morons. Everything looks good compared to measles.
Second, you have natural versus vaccinated immunity backwards — it appears vaccination creates a stronger and longer lasting immune response than infection. (Which makes sense, as natural immunity is scattershot where as vaccination immunity is surgically targeted at a particular critical and difficult to mutate section of coronavirus).
70% to 90% is the range experts use, so treating the bare minimum estimate as gospel is also disingenuous as hell.
Literally nothing you laid out as a fact is correct.Report
The Prime Minister of Israel is saying that the vaccinated are going to need “booster shots” every six months for the rest of their lives.
… and that’s not the nightmare scenario.
This certainly doesn’t sound like “better and stronger” immune response than infection.Report
Why do you think infection-based immunity lasts longer than that?Report
May 24th issue of Nature is reporting 11 months and natural immunity hasn’t waned. That’s research out of Washington U in St. LouisReport
You’re misrepresenting that study. That study showed, as previous studies, that antibody levels drop dramatically 4 months after infection (no such drop has been observed in vaccinated, though we’re just approaching a time when large-scale research can be conducted on antibodies at that interval). What they showed is that the remaining low level of antibodies is likely to be long-term (as in decades, or a lifetime), because of the way they’re produced. They did not know how effective such low levels would be at preventing infection, and I’m not sure we know that now.
You’re drawing firm conclusions from extremely unfirm premises.Report
Judging by the world salad, the ridiculous references, I’m guessing this guy is a NoNewNormal type.
There’s no arguing with conspiracy and crazy.Report
Seems to me that referencing SARS-COV in understanding why we should be skeptical about SARS-COV-2 vaccines is a good idea.
Seems to me that understanding that COVID-19 is a blood disease and an immune disease, far more than it’s a respiratory disease, is pretty crucial to understanding risks.
How many “side-effects” of the vaccine look like symptoms of COVID-19? (One I had flagged was myocarditis).Report
Yeah, I’ve had my fill of crazy. The angular momentum guy on Reddit is at least funny.Report
https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Covid-immunity-lasts-13-months-after-infection-French-study-finds
Sorry. Try this one.Report
When people don’t post quotations they are quoting, I go look them up.
This is the quotation:
“Reality proves the vaccines are safe. Reality also proves the vaccines protect against severe morbidity and death. And like the flu vaccine that needs to be renewed from time to time, it is the same in this case.”
And the additional context is that Israel is recommending 3rd doses for people over 60… many of whom were vaccinated in Jan/Feb and who will be dosed again in Aug/Sept/Oct… as they would be for ordinary flu.
I could see needing booster shots for this as the global roll-out of vaccines will likely take a year or two additionally. Likely there will be a taper as the virus becomes merely endemic and immunity is high, but never perfect.
It is already the public policy recommendation that people over 60 get Flu Shots *every* year.Report
Influenza has at least double the mutation rate of coronaviruses.
If we were vaccinating purely based on the expected mutation rate of coronaviruses, we’d be revaccinating in 2022, just like France was predicting.
We do not vaccinate for the flu every six months. We use Australia’s flu season to predict the newest mutations, and go on that — for a yearly vaccine for a “newly mutated” virus. The match isn’t ever perfect.
Influenza does not use macrophages to reproduce. Imperfect Antibodies can provide a vector to increase viron generation within macrophages, for diseases that do use macrophages to reproduce (which includes sars-cov-2). Like Dengue, which had its vaccine withdrawn for this very reason. Or SARS-cov, which we were unable to create a vaccine that wouldn’t kill people.Report
It’s worth pointing out this is utter nonsense, and it took me a while to drill down into this.
If you want to know what is being talked about, google ‘anti-Spike immune serum’, which was a specific treatment of SARS. You’ll find papers saying things like: We show here that anti-Spike immune serum increased infection of human monocyte-derived macrophages by replication-competent SARS-CoV as well as Spike-pseudotyped lentiviral particles (SARS-CoVpp).
So, it apparently was a real problem with the SARS treatment. And, for those well versed in medical woo, it should come as no surprise that this ‘anti-Spike immune serum’ is not even _vaguely_ related to the current mRNA vaccines for Covid. Which should be obvious for two reasons:
1) Covid is basically the first time mRNA has been used, and mRNA operates pretty much like any other vaccine’s trick of ‘creating something to trigger an immune response’, the only difference is how the vaccine makes a surface for the immune system to trigger. It’s an artificial one instead of a dead virus.
2) More important, SERUMS ARE NOT VACCINES. A serum is a formulation taken from an _infected_ person and that attempts to uses _their_ antibodies to fight the infection. It’s putting antibodies from an infected person into someone else.
In fact, you can tell, he says ‘imperfect antibodies’…vaccines are not antibodies! They do not contain antibodies. They _make you_ make antibodies. He’s just counting on no one knowing that.
Incidentally, antibodies serums (aka, antiserums) are one of the more successful treatments for Covid. Trump got one, Regeneron. These antiserums seem to work pretty well, and appears whatever was wrong with the SARS antiserum does not apply here.
But it’s not a vaccine regardless of how you feel about it. Vaccines are what you give to people before infection to trigger an immune response, antiserums are (certain sorts of) things you give to infected people to hopefully fight the infection.
And now I’m suddenly remembering that Agents of SHIELD episode where Simmons got an alien virus and they were making a thing she was _very_ insistent was an antiserum, not a ‘vaccine’…and that was entirely correct medical terminology, congrats on the show for that.Report
It’s techno-babble.
I like to assume sincerity.
I think we have anti-vac forums holding pseudo-scientific jargon filled discussions. This techno-babble sounds really good if you don’t understand the underlying science. It might even sound better than actual science.
They started with their conclusion, i.e. vaccination=bad. Then they try to science-jargon their way to that. Since good science doesn’t go there, they end up with this.
Notice the focus on [science details] and not the general conclusion [this vaccination should be avoided]. If the conclusion were out there in the open, we could have a reasonable discussion about costs and benefits, but that is a so one sided it would break the starting conclusion.Report
JS – You seem to be surprised by the news that COVID natural immunity is much stronger then the immunity conferred by the vaccines. Don’t you find it just a little curious that this far into the pandemic, with so much detailed data about real-world outcomes, the vaccine-superiority argument would still rest entirely on antibody level tests without any appeal to real-world outcomes?
Happily, real-world outcomes are available. Unhappily for the vaccine companies they are sharply at odds with the predictions made from antibody levels.
Let’s start with the basics. We have never before managed to create a vaccine that is more effective then natural immunity. Bayesian reasoning should start us off with the premise that we would want really strong evidence that the mRNA vaccines have managed to break this previously-unbroken track record before accepting it as fact.
Natural immunity from the SARS epidemic from the early 2000’s has been show to continue to provide protection for at least 17 years, and the evidence that COVID19 immunity will be similar is mounting
(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/health/coronavirus-immunity.html?smid=tw-share).
But on to real-world data, because while theoretical and historical examples are instructive the real-world is what matters most. Fortunately we have a number of studies that address this topic. Two of them are from early in 2021 and provided a leading indicator that natural immunity was going to be robust and substantial in real-world conditions:
The study of Cleveland Clinic staff that were vaccinated / vs. not vaccinated but had previously had COVID:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.01.21258176v2
The early-read study on vaccination vs. natural immunity in Israel for pre-delta variants:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.20.21255670v1
But we don’t just need to rely on 8-month old data. Israel, which has been releasing data on infections, hospitalizations, and deaths by age group, vaccination status, and prior infection status on a daily basis provides more up-to-date numbers that reflect the drop in effectiveness for Delta infections but show that natural immunity continues to provide robust protection:
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762
Bottom line: For those that have had access to the studies the data has been consistent with natural immunity continuing its unbroken run of superiority over vaccination in the real world since early in the game. This has been underreported which leads to an uncomfortable surprise when people who are well-read happen upon this information.Report
Sock-puppets are frowned upon.Report
Veritea is not me. I am not veritea.
We also happen to disagree about whether “we have never before managed to create a vaccine that works better than natural immunity” — but i’m looking for sources, and not finding numbers. (Seems like general consensus is ‘natural immunity is nearly always better’, but that’s a weasel around “why people need two shots”).
Natural Immunity is generally avoided because the side-effects of many diseases are unpleasant and include death.
A strong case can be made that catching “moderate to severe” COVID-19 (the disease, and not getting some virons on you) is avoidable without the vaccine.Report
The naive formula for herd immunity is 1 – 1/R0. i.e. 87.5% for an R0 of 8. If the average person spreads an infectious dose to 8 people, and 30% are unvaccinated, that’s an effective reproduction rate of 2.4. 70% immunity will only create herd immunity up to an R0 of 3.3. It’s also 70% of adults with at least one dose. Only 60% of adults are fully vaccinated, and just under 50% of the total population.
Of course, this doesn’t account for clustering. Young people have lower vaccination rates, and they hang out together in crowded, poorly-ventilated spaces a lot, which results in above-average R0. There are entire states with vaccination rates in the 30s.Report
Non-sterilizing vaccine. Vaccinated are spreading it to other vaccinated.
And non-ill people continue walking around, spreading it to more vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
This is why non-sterilizing vaccines can cause the development of vaccine-evading variants.
Take 60% of adults as fully vaccinated, sure. Swedish study has something like 10% of people as completely asymptomatic (had no idea they were infected), and carrying antibodies 8 months out (If you want to pull a different number, bring on more N!).
So we can bump that up to 64% vaccinated.
I like math, let’s do more of it!Report
I saw a blurb that theorizing that Delta was at least partially caused by the Sinovac vaccine’s low effectiveness.
Now that COVID19 being a global illness getting high vaccine rates in any given country will do very little to prevent the outbreak of new variants. Places with less effective vaccines will be breeding grounds of new variants. We have vision from future in the form of Israel – a highly vaccinated population surrounded by less vaccinated peers. Some 40% of the newly-hospitalized COVID patients in Israel were already vaccinated prior to infection.Report
Delta arose in India last November (that’s High Summer, aka rotting corpse season), when there wasn’t any vaccine in India.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9640497/Stray-dogs-EATING-human-bodies-washed-Indian-river-banks.html
Highly Effective Vaccines may not remain so (Israel is reporting a 39% effectiveness with Pfizer’s vaccine), and this SARS-COV-2 virus shares an 80% similarity with SARS-COV, which does show Antibody Dependent Enhancement.Report
I’ve just read the abstract, but it notes that the levels observed may protect against infection, BUT ALSO RECOMMENDS THE VACCINE TO COVER VARIANTS!
I put that in all caps because it’s clear now that you’re just googling for studies, and not actually reading even the full abstract. Gonna go ahead and mute you, but I assume I’m the last one taking you seriously anyway.Report
… Veritea was rolling way harder on “the vaccines don’t work as well as natural immunity.”
I’m talking Antibody Dependent Enhancement, which if you want to read, you can read about.
If we could trust Pfizer and Moderna to use their fancy shmancy 16-hour turnaround (Miltech), this would be far less of an issue, of course.
Why are you advocating that people should be dosed with military technology that is being used extremely half-assedly? (This is not a trick question. Although if you say, sincerely, “To Cure Cancer.” I will laugh.)Report
End game is some landlord contests it in court and the local judge will look at what the Supreme Court has said.Report
I mean that either the fed is going to have do as Phil suggests downthread and force the states to get the rental assistance money distributed, or the fed is going to have to pay landlords directly, or they are just going to have to accept the political hit of millions of people suddenly being evicted.Report
In a typical year we have about 3.6 million people evicted (1+ million have the court toss them out).
The issue here is no longer that of Covid disrupting things (the vaccination is free, there are a ton of jobs around), the issue is dealing with the politics of normal eviction and the backlog that Covid created.
If we’re looking for a way to lower the amount of rental housing, preventing landlords from evicting deadbeats is the way to do it.Report
If this goes on, at some point, we’ll have landlord jingle mail…Report
I can’t figure out that logic.
What do you think landlords will do with their property instead?Report
The short answer is: Anything else. Although it doesn’t need to be all of them to reduce the supply.
If they’re not allowed to make a profit then they can’t exist. If some of them aren’t allowed to make a profit then some of them can’t exist. The gov is trying, or at least pretending to try, to come down hard on landlords in favor of tenants.
We have a lot of experience with rent control and should be familiar with its effects. For some tenants this is “rent control” all the way down to zero.
There is always someone it helps. There is always some tear-filled person you can put on the camera who will talk about how they’re going to become homeless if they’re forced out.
None of that changes if you’re trying to reduce the supply of housing, preventing land lords from dealing with deadbeats is a good way to do it.Report
The federal government put $25 Billion in play with the last stimulus bill to help landlords by supporting renters who are behind. States have dropped that ball. That’s not Biden’s fault, nor is the renters fault. Landlords have money coming – they need to take it up with their governors.Report
Politicians pointing fingers at other politicians doesn’t pay the bills.
If I’m a landlord who isn’t getting paid and who can’t evict non-paying tenants, then I shouldn’t be a landlord (and maybe even can’t be a landlord).Report
why not? These are temporary conditions. And its a far sight better for the economy to delay the economic action of eviction under the present circumstances since mass evictions are likely to increase COVID cases – which also has an economic impact.
And again – landlords can collect funds to offset this loss once their states actually get the federally appropriated dollars out the door. It may not make them completely whole, but it moves them significantly in that direction.Report
We are past the total economic shut down which was the original reason for a moratorium.
The current conditions are
1) Imperfect but free vaccines
2) People refusing to take them
3) The rest of the world creating covid mutations because of lack of supply of vaccine.
These conditions will go on for years. This is the new normal.
We have a massive housing shortage. The gov making that worse by reducing supply and also preventing efficient distribution suggests it is not “a far sight better”.
The gov is helping some people at the expense of hurting more, maybe many more. If you can’t find a rental now, or if the cost of housing increases, that’s partly because of the gov.
You’re assuming that money maps well onto the landlords who are dealing with these renters. You’re assuming the governments who have already dropped the ball pick it up. You’re also assuming the gov can somehow tell the difference between normal renters who can’t pay the rent and somehow more deserving renters who can’t pay the rent because of covid.Report
Democrats offer money to pay the rent.
Republican states block it.
Republican voters: “Welp, nothing can be done except evicting the tenants!”Report
See, the difference between you and me is that I think that is a good thing, and you think it is a bad thing. The reason we _have_ a housing shortage is because of landlords hoarding property, causing rates to go up. Landlords are a bad thing, not a good thing.
And so I ask, somewhat more carefully: What exactly do you think will happen to houses that landlords do not feel they can rent out?
Because there really are only two options, once renting is removed: They sit on empty houses and continue to pay property taxes, or they sell them.
Now, a lot of them will sell to _other_ people who then rent them out, but the premise here is a systematic thing that causes ‘being a landlord’ to be less desirable, because the government might make you house tenants for free, right? So fewer properties total are going to be rented out.
So…what is going to happen to those rental properties?
They will be sold. Often at a loss. To people who want to own a house.Report
They will be sold. Often at a loss. To people who want to own a house.
Depends on where you are.Report
Nononono. The argument Dark Matter is making that the owners _won’t be renting them out_, exacerbating the housing shortage.
Investment firms that buy houses then _rent them out_. It doesn’t matter that the property changed hand. It doesn’t change the amount of rental properties at all, and thus will not affect the housing shortage.
…well, anymore than them being rental properties already has.Report
I was disagreeing with “to people who want to own a house”, specifically to the “people” part.
“to corporations who want to own the house” is something that I would have been down with, 100%.
And, yeah, they’re going to rent them out to people who want to live in them, that’s for sure.Report
Ah, okay.
Yes, these investment firms will, in reality, snatch up all the houses…which they’re doing anyway.
The situation is already broken. Badly broken. We’re just going to let a smaller and small amount of people own every piece of real estate in this country and charge us to live on it.
So I think worrying about what might slightly slow this or speed it up is kinda pointless. It’s already at a unlivable point, the point where a vast chunk of people literally cannot purchase homes in any reasonable range. The only reason there isn’t rioting in the streets is that a lot of the _older_ generations do own homes and lets the younger generations live in them. But we are operating on borrowed time…those older people will die, their estate will sell their house, and tada, more rental properties.
If anything, removing the property from ‘individual rental property owners’, who vote _extremely selfishly_ to protect their ‘investment’, and putting that rental properties in the hands of giant corporations, will make doing something about this politically easier.
Right now there are an asston of older, moderately well-off individual homeowners who own rental properties as an ‘investment’ and fight tooth and nail to fix the system they are on top of, and they vote. Maybe we’d be more willing to fix the system after they all end up selling to faceless corporations who *checks notes* still cannot vote.Report
The corporations can’t vote, but if you own the congressman, you don’t have to.
I, personally, think that changes to “zoning” will fix some of it (not all of it, but some of it) and removing tariffs for housing building materials will fix some of it (not all of it, but some of it).
We want houses to be two things:
1. Good Investments
2. Affordable
And we don’t get both of those.Report
The only reason we want #1 is that the financial world has been allowed to run wild for decades, making literally all other investments either have no returns at all, or unsafe and basically nonsensical.
You used to be able to put money in banks, get a reasonable rate of return. Can’t do that anymore. The government will lend to them for free, so why would they pay you to hold your money?
Or, slightly riskier, you could invest in a stock market that valued companies based on _reality_ instead of nonsense, and get dividends based on mostly-steady corporate profits. Nope. Now it’s all speculation and craziness, and the way you make money is by selling stock, not dividends.
And now real estate investment has gone crazy, too. Which not only means American really have nowhere safe to put their money for the future, but, uh, we sorta needed houses to live in!
Teal deer is that we don’t need housing to be a ‘good investment’. We need it to be affordable. The ‘good investment’ is just because everyone sorta ended up with it _as_ their only investment due to speculative bubbles rendering all other investments too risky. (And now, a bunch of people have housing as an investment and it is _really_ hard to move away.)Report
Landlords “hoarding” property isn’t going to cause “a housing shortage” if you and they are willing to rent. In theory it could raise housing prices, but the actual problem is we’re not building enough housing.
The “rental” market only partially overlaps with the “want to buy a home” market. At the moment I HAVE to rent a place because of my situation. For me a landlord converting a rental to a home reduces my theoretical supply.
You’re also ignoring that apartment buildings are an efficient way to house people and they’re often a lot cheaper than home ownership. Eviction moratoriums is going to lower, by a lot, the willingness of anyone to invest in their creation. That’s a long term issue, but a “temporary” measure still in place months after everyone could have taken the vaccine looks a lot more like politics as opposed to public health.Report
This really makes no sense to me. We had the legally dubious moratorium to begin with but whatever. A decision was made in a time of crisis.
What’s the justification for continuing it at this point? Vaccines are available and vaccination rates, while they could be better are still climbing. Plus plenty of landlords are just regular people who still need to pay the mortgage and upkeep on these properties. Unless the feds (read taxpayer) are going to pick up the tab I don’t see how this is sustainable.Report
There are two underlying issues – first, states (especially red states) have done a poor job of getting the rent assistance out the door that was part of the last COVID relief bill. There are many and varying reasons, but the money the feds put on the table is not flowing. And second, many landlords filed eviction proceedings during the moratorium, which means with the moratorium done, eviction proceedings can proceed more quickly because the county and parish courts already have the matters before them. That translate to upwards of 7 million renters (according to NPR), and allowing that all to go forward creates a significant economic hit just as things might be getting better.Report
Fair enough but I still don’t see how this is a solution.Report
Its a short term band-aid focused on keeping things from back sliding. Its also a prod to the states to get federal funds in play. Blue states will take the hint.Report
Welcome to the future. We don’t have the will or even the ability to fix many of our long-term problems, so we trip from one temporary measure to the next, with politicians hoping that they will be long gone before their jury-rigged non-solutions collapse.
We stopped building enough housing in the places where housing demand was highest, helping to turn a bunch of housing markets into over-leveraged financial bets. The idea of paying cash or having significant cash reserves to weather economic contractions becomes an anathema the the supposedly financially savvy. The idea of smaller homes or duplexes or ADUs becomes an anathema to those who want their neighborhoods to have a respectable middle-class veneer. The idea of letting markets find their bottom and recover gradually becomes an anathema to politicians.
Well, here we are. And we are going to stay in these increasingly frequent cycles of pumped up booms and painful shocks caused by this or that seemingly-random shock. My suggestion is to find a way to be resilient at the local level and try to be long volatility.Report
You know, there’s very little downside to this.
Sure, it might *TECHNICALLY* be “unconstitutional” but you know who is going to make that decision?
Brett Kavanaugh!
Biden wants people to have a place to live.
Brett Kavanaugh doesn’t.
And when you see it through that particular lens, this moves from a losing issue to a winning one.Report
I think, if that was his play, he’d be contemplating a longer moratorium than a month or two. Though at the moment this is all either inside baseball or a trial balloon.Report
Agreed.Report
Supreme Court Returns One Day after Moratorium Expires.Report
insightful catch.Report
Once again, there are no consequences of a right-wing takeover of the federal judiciary.Report