Op-Ed: We Fixed the Eviction Crisis—Then Walked Away

During the worst public health crisis in a century, the United States did something rare: it acted quickly and effectively to prevent mass homelessness. Faced with a looming eviction crisis in 2020 and 2021, the federal government rolled out the Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) program as part of its pandemic response. It wasn’t perfect. It was delayed. It was bureaucratic. But ultimately—it worked.

In his book Poverty, by America, sociologist Matthew Desmond highlights one of the most underappreciated facts in the pandemic’s aftermath: “The Emergency Rental Assistance program, in tandem with other pandemic aid like the expanded Child Tax Credit, had cut the eviction filing rate in half in city after city across the United States.” He goes on: “Eviction rates were lower than they had ever been on record.”

For a country that typically treats eviction as background noise—a permanent feature of urban life—this should have been front-page news. We had achieved something that once seemed impossible. The U.S. had dramatically reduced evictions by directly helping people stay housed. Landlords were compensated. Tenants remained stable. And communities avoided the spiraling costs that come with displacement.

We don’t connect eviction to the housing crisis—but we should.

Eviction is one of the leading drivers of homelessness in the United States, creating a direct pipeline from housing instability to life on the streets or in shelters. When families are forcibly removed from their homes, they often have nowhere to go—especially in a rental market plagued by rising costs, stagnant wages, and a severe shortage of affordable units.

Eviction not only disrupts employment and school continuity, but also damages credit, making it harder to secure future housing. Preventing eviction is therefore not just a matter of crisis intervention—it’s a central strategy in alleviating the housing crisis itself.

By keeping people housed, we reduce the flow into homelessness, ease pressure on overburdened shelter systems, and help stabilize communities. In a country where building new affordable housing takes years, eviction prevention is one of the most immediate, cost-effective tools we have to address a significant piece of the housing crisis.

In his book, Desmond points out the cruel irony: when the program was faltering in its early days, “everyone was writing and tweeting about it.” When it started working? Silence.

As a result, a policy success of historic proportions was politically invisible. Journalists moved on. Influencers stopped posting. Politicians took little credit. And the Emergency Rental Assistance program, which should have marked the beginning of a new chapter in U.S. housing policy, was instead quietly phased out.

We returned, as Desmond writes with devastating clarity, “to normal, to a society where seven eviction filings are issued every minute.”

What made the ERA program so effective wasn’t just the money—it was the directness and simplicity of the intervention. The government didn’t build a massive new bureaucracy. It didn’t reinvent the wheel. It simply gave people the resources they needed to avoid eviction. In most cases, that meant paying landlords directly to cover missed rent.

ERA demonstrated that housing insecurity is not an unmanageable crisis or an intractable policy dilemma. It is a solvable problem—if we are willing to fund the solutions.

That makes the program’s demise all the more frustrating. Imagine if we discovered a medication that cut heart attacks in half, then took it off the shelves because no one wrote a viral op-ed about it.

Desmond’s core insight goes beyond policy—it’s about the politics of poverty. Because ERA’s rollout was bumpy at first, it attracted criticism. Once it stabilized, and the eviction wave was averted, the success became too quiet to sustain attention.

“Because journalists and pundits and social influencers did not celebrate the program,” Desmond writes, “ERA garnered few champions in Washington. Elected leaders learned that they could direct serious federal resources to fighting evictions, make a real dent in the problem, and reap little credit for it.”

This is the political tragedy of ERA: its success offered no reward. In an environment where politicians are rewarded for theatrical problem-solving, the ERA’s quiet effectiveness was, paradoxically, a liability. Nobody got a headline. Nobody got reelected because the eviction rate in their district was halved. So the program died.

Unfortunately the cost of this is probably incalculable and unnoticed in most circles.

In allowing ERA to expire, we abandoned millions of low-income renters to a system that is deeply rigged against them. We already knew the scale of the problem. Each year, landlords file millions of eviction cases. Many tenants never make it to court. Others are pushed into informal displacement—moves under duress, under threat, under fear.

This churn doesn’t just destabilize families. It destabilizes schools, neighborhoods, and local economies. Children lose classmates. Employers lose workers. Hospitals see more visits. Social services strain.

Eviction is not just a symptom of poverty—it is a cause of it. And we had a solution in hand. But we treated ERA as an emergency tool rather than a structural reform. And so it disappeared.

Desmond’s writing makes clear that we failed not because we couldn’t fix housing insecurity—but because we didn’t value the fix.

The answer lies partly in how we talk about poverty—and who we listen to when it’s solved.

Our political system is excellent at responding to panic and outrage. But it is remarkably poor at rewarding prevention. ERA was not flashy. It did not involve dramatic reforms or institutional battles. It just worked. And because of that, it didn’t align with our media economy’s need for conflict-driven narratives.

Moreover, many of the people helped by ERA—renters, disproportionately low-income and people of color—are among the least empowered politically. There is no powerful lobby for tenants. There are few think tanks devoted to lifting up renter stability. And so, a program that materially improved millions of lives faded without fanfare.

What ERA gave us was more than a bandage—it was a blueprint. We now know what it takes to keep people housed. We know that eviction prevention is cheaper, more humane, and more effective than letting people fall into crisis. And we know that large-scale rental support is not only administratively possible but politically popular when it’s needed most.

The question is: can we build on that knowledge?

If we are serious about reducing poverty, we must demand more than short-term relief. We must invest in a permanent architecture of rental support—one that ensures families aren’t tossed out over a missed paycheck, and that landlords are incentivized to keep tenants rather than remove them.

We also need a media and political culture that notices success. That doesn’t just pounce on bureaucratic delays but celebrates bureaucratic victories. That rewards politicians not only for crisis management but for preventing crisis in the first place.

Desmond closes his reflection on ERA with a line that should haunt all of us: “Meaningful, tangible change had arrived, and we couldn’t see it.”

We must learn to see it. And we must learn to sustain it.

We proved we could cut eviction in half. The next step is refusing to go back.

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