HOW THE CDC BECAME AMERICA’S LANDLORD

AT AGE 28, Esteban Rivera purchased his first home, a duplex in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It was just off Long Island Sound and a quick 15-minute commute to his job at a home remodeling company. The idea was to live in one of the units while continuing to rent out the other apartment to the tenants—a couple with two kids—that he’d inherited from the previous owner.

This straightforward plan was upended by some historically bad timing. Rivera purchased his home in March 2020, just as the pandemic hit. “Literally the world stopped,” he said. “Nothing mattered.”

Rivera was temporarily furloughed from his job. Shortly thereafter his tenants, now also out of work, told him that they couldn’t make April’s rent payment of $1,375.

Over the next several months, Rivera says, they were able to make things work. He used their security deposit to cover one month of missed rent, and they eventually used a stimulus check from the federal government to make a partial payment in July. His employer called him back to work in June. In September, Rivera even managed to secure one of his tenants a job at the same remodeling company he worked at, hoping that would set things right.

Instead, their partial rent payments became even less frequent, and the back rent owed continued to mount. Eventually it totaled close to $12,000.

“I understand that they were trying to make their own ends meet too,” he says, “but it was at my own expense and my own detriment.” Rivera ended up moving back in with family in New York. He rented the unit he’d intended to make his home to his cousin to help cover the financial strain caused by a non-paying tenant.

In more normal times, Rivera would have been within his rights to evict his tenants for nonpayment of rent. But an eviction moratorium imposed by Connecticut’s Democratic governor, Ned Lamont, in April 2020 banned any landlord from serving a “notice to quit,” the first step in Connecticut’s eviction process, until July 2020. It wouldn’t truly end until July 2021.

Lamont’s order was not unique. All across the country, mayors, city councils, governors, and judges issued emergency halts to evictions in the early days of COVID-19. The immediate justification was to keep hard-pressed renters, thrown out of work by the global pandemic, from also losing the home they’d need to safely socially distance.

These eviction moratoriums were dropped into place with virtually no public discussion of the limits of bureaucratic power, the rights of private property holders, the unintended consequences, or any other ramifications of such moves. Governments simply asserted that they had these powers and then used them.

The moratoriums—like so many other extreme COVID-era measures that were supposed to be an emergency stopgap—soon became a seemingly permanent feature of public policy. In the initial months of the pandemic, 43 states adopted some form of eviction restriction, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. By September 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention