Just about the time the District is coming out of the coronavirus crisis, it will face a new one over homelessness, housing experts warn.
Thousands of tenants who recently lost their jobs because of the pandemic shutdown can no longer afford to pay their rent or will soon lack the money to do so. They’re able to stay in their homes for now because of an emergency moratorium on evictions. But the ban ends 60 days after Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) lifts the public health emergency, and evictions are likely to surge, according to officials and advocates for tenants.
Jewel Burgess, 39, is “definitely worried” about losing her one-bedroom apartment in Northeast. She stopped paying her monthly $1,002 rent in April in a strike over the lack of cleaning and other poor conditions in her building. Now she can’t afford it after being furloughed in May from her job delivering meals for the city’s Office on Aging.