With a week to go until Oregon’s eviction moratoriums expire, Multnomah County commissioners are expected to extend protections for struggling renters across the county. The board will take a vote Thursday morning.
Multnomah County first issued a local moratorium in mid-March to keep tenants who had lost their wages due to COVID-19 in their homes and prevent a spike in homelessness during a public health crisis. The rule banned landlords from evicting people without giving a reason why — known as a no-cause eviction — or because they couldn’t pay rent. The county later suspended enforcement of the local moratorium in favor of the state’s version.
But with the state’s moratorium set to expire at the end of the month and the country still in the throes of the pandemic, commissioners are considering stretching both the county’s state of emergency and the eviction moratorium until Jan. 8.
The moratorium would offer identical protections to the state’s moratorium. Renters wouldn’t have to finish paying their back rent until six months after the county’s state of emergency ends. During this half-year grace period, renters are expected to keep paying the new rent that comes due, as well as make up for the missed payments. Tenants do not need to prove they couldn’t pay in order to be protected under the moratorium
According to estimates by the mayor’s office, Portlanders fell behind on rent by somewhere between $120 to $125 million in the last six months.
If the county’s moratorium doesn’t pass, renters could still be protected from evictions by a federal moratorium, which runs through the end of the year. It’s also possible the state’s moratorium, set to run out at the end of the month, could be extended. But it’s not clear whether the state will take up the matter imminently with the federal moratorium offering a safety net, according to Troy Pickard, a tenant attorney based in Portland.
“I think a lot of activists and legislators have said, 'OK, we’ve got this now until the end of the year and that sounds good enough to us,” Pickard said. But he notes the federal moratorium comes with a few more strings attached than the local rules.
Unlike the county’s moratorium, the federal version requires tenants to fill out a formand give it to their landlord to trigger the protections. Individual renters must expect to make under $99,000 this year and sign a statement that they are unable to pay rent “due to substantial loss of household income, loss of compensable hours of work or wages, lay-offs, or extraordinary out-of-pocket medical expenses,” among other declarations.
If the county’s version passes, renters won’t need to worry about those federal restrictions.
City and county leaders have warned these moratoriums are merely a stopgap measure. Once they end, renters will be expected to make good on all their back rent, despite months of lost wages and persistent unemployment related to the pandemic. Without state and federal rent assistance, local leaders have warned of a flood of evictions when the six-month grace period runs out.
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