Property owners are one of many groups that have been financially impacted by the pandemic. Originally, under Federal law, tenants could not be evicted from a rental property if they could no longer pay rent due to the pandemic, and renters should’ve applied to the Emergency Rental Assistance Program for funds in order to pay their landlords. That program has since changed so that renters and landlords can now apply for financial assistance, but another problem has surfaced. I spoke with Austin Badon, Clerk of First City Court in New Orleans, about the growing backlog of evictions his office is dealing with.
Was this backlog something we could see coming?
Yes, we talked about this happening months ago, and now it has arrived. I'm getting more phone calls from landlords complaining that their tenant has received emergency rental assistance, and they're still not paying their rent. There's no emergency rental police set up in the Emergency Rental Assistance Program through the Department of Treasury. Now a lot of tenants are leaving their apartments without paying their landlords.
What do you tell frustrated landlords that haven’t been paid?
Landlords have been burdened with keeping tenants in their units. Now that the eviction moratorium has expired and evictions have been able to proceed and the landlords have started to get emergency rental assistance, some renters are now leaving before a new month begins so they won’t have to pay rent, making it difficult to sue them. Whenever you sue somebody, you have to serve them. If the tenant has vacated a unit and you don’t know where they are, you don’t know where they are to serve them… the problem is this program was set up where the money was supposed to be given to the tenant. It should have been given to the landlord because that's who it is owed to. The rental assistance program never stated that tenants are mandated to take care of their monthly rent or utilities.
This just seems like a federal government bait and switch. A lot of folks feel like the term “landlord” denotes wealth and that's not necessarily the case, right?
In the greater New Orleans metropolitan area, the majority of the landlords are “mom and pop” property owners. The other problem is if a landlord is trying to evict somebody, because of the backlog that I have in my office right now. I can't give landlords a court date until probably the end of January 2022. That means the tenant gets to stay in the unit for November, December, and January.. I've seen an uptick in evictions and in small claims cases where the landlord is now trying to sue the tenant for non-payment of rent, knowing the tenant received emergency rental assistance.
