Corporate Landlords Evicted Thousands During the Pandemic, Despite CDC Moratorium

On September 4, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued a national moratorium on most evictions for nonpayment of rent. The moratorium would remain in place until August 26, 2021, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of landlords fighting against the program.

Four corporate landlords evicted thousands of people during the pandemic, despite an eviction moratorium that was in effect at the time.

They accomplished this by misleading and deceiving tenants and even allegedly attempting to frame them for child neglect.

The revelations come from a House of Representatives investigation that took more than a year and has led politicians to call for more tenant protections. The investigation showed that Siegel Group, Pretium Partners, Invitation Homes, and Ventron Management filed nearly 15,000 eviction notices from March 2020 to July 2021. Siegel Group was singled out for its actions being “uniquely egregious.”

According to the investigation, Siegel Group, which owns 12,000 apartments over eight states, distributed a court order to tenants that falsely claimed that the eviction moratorium had been lifted. A company executive also allegedly told property managers to deliver the court order after 5 pm on Friday, with the hopes that the tenants would move out before they could call to verify it on Monday.

A company directive also told property managers in Texas to replace working air conditioning units with faulty ones and then call Child Protective Services on the tenants and accuse them of neglecting their children. Falsely reporting child abuse or neglect is a felony in Texas.

Meanwhile, Siegal was collecting millions of dollars in pandemic relief, taking in $1.8 million in rental assistance and $2.3 million from the Paycheck Protection Program. Siegal also evicted 89 tenants who had pending rental assistance applications.

Ventron filed more than 4,000 eviction notices while the moratorium was in place, even though the company only owns 8,000 units. Pretium Partners had a strict policy of filing for evictions after one month of missed payments, despite assistance funds taking three months to reach tenants.

Invitation Homes downplayed how many tenants they evicted, claiming in March 2021 that just 6% of the tenants that it filed eviction notices against had left their homes. However, that figure only counted those formally evicted by court order, and lawmakers say that many more did not wait for it to get to that point. They say that 27% of those who received eviction notices from Invitation Homes vacated the property.

The actions also disproportionately affected communities of color. An April 2021 study by the non-profit organization Private Equity Stakeholder Project revealed that Pretium evicted tenants from black majority communities four times more often than white majority communities with similar income levels.

Despite the eviction moratorium, the evictions occurred while corporate landlords’ profits surged.

During a Senate hearing on the revelations, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called for the creation of the Tenant Protection Bureau to hold landlords, particularly corporate ones like Siegal, responsible.

“Today, with families struggling with these rapidly rising rents, and with the economy at risk of being pushed into recession by the Fed’s overzealous interest rate hikes,” Warren explained at the hearing, “it is urgent that we take steps to protect renters from predatory schemes and ensure that corporate landlords at least follow the rules that are in place.”