December 22, 2020

Video Documents Nursing Home Tragedy

When COVID-19 started spreading through nursing homes last spring, the United States had no first-hand experience battling a coronavirus.

That’s a fair point but an inadequate explanation for a tragedy in which more than 100,000 nursing home residents and staff to date have died of COVID-related causes.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Governments either wouldn’t or couldn’t provide enough personal protective equipment, forcing the certified nursing assistants to don garbage bags and recycle masks. A shortage of tests limited the ability to detect asymptomatic cases and contain outbreaks. The Centers for Disease Control, prior to the pandemic, had documented poor infection control practices. This made nursing homes a petri dish for spreading the virus. Acute staffing shortages compounded the dangers.

This video by AARP is a chronology of what went wrong. It’s a horror story of panic, chaos, and blunders. It’s also a start on understanding how we can do better in the future to protect our most vulnerable population – the elderly.

“We need to continue to raise alarms and demand action to prevent anything like this from happening again,” said Bill Sweeney, a senior vice president of AARP.  AARP is a corporate partner of the Center for Retirement Research, which sponsors this blog.

Read our blog posts in our ongoing coverage of COVID-19. …Learn More

December 15, 2020

Crisis for Renters Threatens to Get Worse

Many unemployed and underemployed workers have run out of options for paying the rent. The National Low Income Housing Coalition, the Aspen Institute, and other organizations estimate that up to 40 million renters risk being evicted this winter. Congress is currently negotiating a new COVID-19 relief package but it’s not yet known whether it will extend a CDC moratorium on evictions or go beyond the Cares Act last spring and provide rental assistance to help renters and, by extension, their landlords.

Squared Away spoke with Sarah Saadian, vice president of public policy for the National Low Income Housing Coalition, about what she describes as an impending calamity.

Q: How bad is the current situation?

Saadian: It’s really hard to get data on how many people have been evicted because there isn’t a national database – only state data. But we know that nearly one in five renters are behind on their rent, and they’re disproportionately Black and brown renters. When the CDC moratorium on evictions expires Dec. 31, renters are going to owe somewhere between $25 billion and $70 billion. That’s a huge amount of back rent that renters realistically can’t afford to pay off. So what we’re likely to see is a huge increase in evictions and, in the worse cases, homelessness unless Congress extends the moratorium and provides really robust resources for emergency rental assistance.

Q: What do you expect if the moratorium isn’t extended beyond Dec. 31?

It would be a calamity. Because of the loopholes in the CDC moratorium and because of the sheer amount of rent renters owe, if there’s any gap between when the moratorium expires and the Biden administration takes action – if they do – you’re going to see potentially millions of people lose their homes in the dead of winter when we’re dealing with a resurgence of COVID. It’s an emergency on top of an emergency.

Q: A UCLA study said that 44 states had moratoriums but that 27 have lifted them and that the resulting evictions have resulted in more than 10,000 deaths. Make the connection between housing and health.

When low-income people are evicted from their homes, they don’t have a lot of good options. They either are doubling or tripling up with other families, or they go into homeless shelters. In either case, it’s more difficult to social distance, and it’s easier for the virus to spread. If Congress doesn’t take action, it harms all of us. Not only does it mean more of us dying from COVID but it puts more strain on our health care system. 

Q: This is a complicated issue, because small landlords have to pay their mortgages and can’t necessarily afford to cover tenants’ rents. What is your position on that?

The best solution for both renters and landlords is emergency rental assistance because that eliminates the back rent renters owe and makes up the lost income landlords need to operate their property. It is not every day that landlords and renters can agree. A lot of landlords don’t like the moratorium but it’s absolutely essential to have an extension of the CDC moratorium at least until state and local governments can distribute rental money to people in need. Even if Congress provides emergency rental assistance, but doesn’t extend the CDC moratorium, then millions of people will still lose their homes.

Q: You mentioned minorities are particularly affected by evictions. How about particular states or income groups? Rural vs urban renters? …Learn More