The Eviction Moratorium: How New York & California Responded to a Pandemic-Driven Housing Crisis

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In March of 2020, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo first announced a statewide moratorium on residential and commercial evictions to safeguard tenants from eviction. Two bills were most prominent to the state’s policy plan—the Tenant Safe Harbor Act and the COVID Emergency Eviction and Foreclosure Prevention Act. The Governor signed the Tenant Safe Harbor Act on June 30, 2020, along with additional legislation providing financial assistance to residential renters and landlords. Cuomo signed the CEEFPA in December of the same year, effectively suspending eviction and foreclosure proceedings to give renters and homeowners the opportunity to submit a hardship declaration, a written statement asking tenants to indicate their qualification for eviction protection due to issues related to COVID-19.

California, Oregon, Nevada, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. implemented similar COVID-19 eviction moratorium policies in 2020 to mitigate large waves of eviction and unhoused state residents in the wake of the pandemic. By late 2021, a majority of participating states had allowed their initial policies to expire. However, New York state repeatedly extended its main moratorium measures within the Tenant Safe Harbor Act until January 15, 2022, even in light of efforts to phase out the policies, including a Supreme Court ruling to strike down the hardship declaration requirement of the CEEFPA in August 2021. Now, after a two-year, nationwide effort to implement a variety of emergency tenant protections, and more recent efforts to lift them, New York residential evictions are only prohibited while tenants are actively in the process of applying for rental assistance. 

In both New York and California in particular, pandemic-era eviction moratoriums illustrate rare renter-first policies in a time of a national housing, unemployment, and health crisis. Despite the unexpectedly supportive nature of the states’ moratorium policies, the ongoing collateral of their expirations indicates that the notorious housing crises in New York and California require support beyond where the policies’ defunct measures end. Even prior to the pandemic, approximately one quarter of New York households occupied by renters were spending more than half of their income on rent. It is imperative to assess the long-term effects of the moratorium on renters and landlords in the state to assess how to best support those at risk of becoming unhoused. 

California’s statewide eviction moratorium and temporary tenant protections were enacted on September 1, 2020 and expired on September 30, 2021. One accommodation remained after this, still requiring landlords to apply for rental assistance, a similar process to tenant rental assistance application, by March 31, 2022 before they try to evict tenants through the courts for failing to pay rent. Although a landlord may give a tenant a notice to “pay or quit,” a notice from the landlord that gives the tenant a certain amount of time to pay the outstanding rent owed or vacate the home, they will not be able to legally evict tenants until the tenants apply to the California COVID-19 Rent Relief program. When it came to accessibility to the program, California stated that undocumented residents were eligible to apply for rent relief, and that applicants’ immigration or citizenship status will not be disclosed to government agencies. But language barriers, due to imprecise translations on forms and more, pose an additional challenge for non-English speaking immigrants who sought rent relief or intended to declare hardship status. While the option to apply for rent relief is still available to tenants, submitted applications can still be denied and applicants may not ultimately receive the assistance they need. The uncertainty of this process, advertised as a beacon of hope in the post-moratorium era, does not eliminate the insecurity many continue to face as the pandemic still reels and its retroactive consequences—like the economic upheaval of whole industries—are just beginning to take effect. 

New York can look to California’s example. With a comparative head start on its expiration timeline, California has already identified persisting weak links in the state’s housing system following the moratorium expiration. At the time of the September 2021 expiration, about 724,000 California households owed a total of $2.5 billion in rent. Following California's moratorium expiration, the state’s Superior Court started an online dispute resolution program for evictions. The official court notice of an eviction filing sent to tenants indicates at the top in capital letters that they should apply for rental assistance and offers a phone number and website for a rental assistance program, as well as phone numbers for seven legal aid organizations. 

Although individual dynamics between tenants and landlords vary greatly, landlords generally have increased access to lawyers and more opportunity to assert authority over those who rent from them. These often innately imbalanced business relationships, compounded with widespread financial insecurity among both parties, further jeopardize the stability of both housing for tenants and income for small landlords. These established imbalances have motivated Californians to demand court clerks to at least more intensely evaluate landlord applications prior to evictions in the wake of the full moratorium expiration. Even pre-pandemic, New York landlords filed notably more evictions than other major American cities like Chicago. The main vehicle for maintaining moratorium-era tenant protections lies in the barriers to file a full eviction, as demonstrated by both California and New York courts. Left-leaning New York Democrats are beginning to advocate for “good-cause evictions,” limiting the number of reasons for eviction that landlords could reference, which would sustain tenant protections that cater to the context of the pandemic beyond the moratorium.

In New York, California, and across the country, those who were at high risk for eviction at the height of the pandemic are likely in the remaining group of residents still at risk of eviction after the pandemic. New York and California are states with high levels of ethnic and linguistic diversity, positioning them to be strong case studies of mitigating processes used to avoid a housing crisis across diverse local communities. Early May 2021 in New York found landlords filing evictions almost four times more often in neighborhoods hit hardest by COVID-19, which are predominantly Black and Latine communities. These same communities have experienced disproportionate health and economic devastation since the beginning of the pandemic, which has further exacerbated existing housing inequities caused by a long legacy of racist housing policies in the US. 

Following Cuomo’s resignation in August 2021 due to sexual harrassment allegations, the state of New York instituted Governor Kathy Hochul in his place. Hochul has been at the forefront of managing the moratorium, and has fielded concerns from both tenants and landlords regarding the moratorium. While the moratorium provided strong tenant protections, the policy also placed landlords nationwide in a vulnerable position. The moratorium led many landlords and property owners to lose major portions of their rental revenue over the past two years, especially in New York, Miami, and San Francisco. The obvious repercussions of this income loss include landlords’ subsequent inability to maintain rental properties, and sustain themselves financially. Mutual landlord-tenant cooperation is key to mitigating an eviction crisis. In September 2021, Hochul signed a set of bills that would extend the New York Safe Harbor Act moratorium until January 15, 2022. However, this extension was previously contested by the Supreme Court the month prior, propelled by a large group of landlords and allies. Pantelis Chyrsafis, et al. v. Lawrence K. Marks on Application for Injunctive Relief was built upon landlords' assertion that the standing moratorium deprives property owners of their due process rights and violates their First Amendment rights against compelled speech. The Supreme Court voted 6-3 in favor of the landlords, and effectively terminated part of New York State’s eviction moratorium before it was set to expire at the end of August. The Supreme Court decision only applied to a measure that prevents tenants from being evicted if they file the hardship form, claiming pandemic-related financial pressure, instead of requiring tenants to prove so in court with evidence.

Hochul declared the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down this portion of the New York moratorium on evictions “heartless.” In response, Hochul was able to extend the Tenant Safe Harbor Act despite the Supreme Court’s decision since the case specifically did not include the act in its grievances. Hochul’s initial focus was on extending as many moratorium policies as possible to avoid a major crisis, and she was able to provide further aid to New Yorkers through this channel until the January deadline. In the same announcement, Hochul encouraged residents to apply for rent assistance, in a similar timeline to California, via New York State's Emergency Rental Assistance Program. As of August 31, 2021, ERAP had garnered more than $1.2 billion in funding, including more than $300 million in direct payments to more than 23,000 landlords. However, the funding ran out before September even ended.

These stopgap measures employed by states to support tenants and landlords through a tumultuous period of widespread economic insecurity have been confronted with unbalanced tenant-landlord relationships, demands, and basic needs. Looking forward, it is important to consider how to best stabilize the housing market as the nation reels from the pandemic. Starting with an increased presence of good-cause evictions in state policy is a step which may accommodate the diversity of reasons tenants encounter eviction proceedings, pandemic-related and otherwise. 

Emily Debs (BC ’24) is a staff writer at CPR majoring in Political Science, and minoring in Economics and Race & Ethnicity Studies. A multiracial Californian, she is particularly interested in examining the intersectional nature of US policymaking and racial dynamics over the course of American history.