As virus grips nation, advocates move to halt evictions

NEW YORK — On the day after the coronavirus outbreak was declared a global pandemic, Joe Ferguson was given a batch of court-ordered evictions to carry out in his job as constable in Tucson, Arizona. While housing advocates praised the Trump administration package as an “important first step,” they said that by excluding renters, an often economically vulnerable population, it does not go nearly far enough. “It’s not nearly enough.” “We need big-scale solutions,” said Andrea Shapiro with the Metropolitan Council on Housing, a New York-based advocacy organization. “Home ownership is something that’s really important, especially to the black community, and now you have a lot of people who have owned homes for decades and they’re actually becoming renters because they don’t have any other options.” “The practices and the policies are so aggressive in order to displace people but the remedies and relief, they are so few and far between,” Small said. “Folks who are performers or play music, who pick up bar-tending shifts here and there, who do various kinds of gig work are not going to show loss of income because there isn’t a steady stream to begin with,” said Deepa Varma, executive director of the San Francisco Tenants Union, a housing advocacy group.