The existence of anti-discrimination legislation in housing, primarily in the Fair Housing Act, makes it, at the very least, difficult to point to any overtly discriminatory laws that may have led to the racial eviction disparity. Disparate homeownership rates along racial lines and the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on minority communities simply exacerbate a social problem. The eviction crisis magnifies both pre-existing structural inequalities in the United States as well as de facto discrimination practices that laws do not necessarily explicitly forbid. Laws are only a small part of the problem. The disproportionate impact on communities of color reflects longstanding, historically rooted systemic discrimination against minority groups. According to records of the Boston Housing Court, “78 percent of eviction cases in Boston that were suspended due to COVID-19 were in communities of color.” Health and housing expert Emily Benfer stated, “you cannot talk about housing justice without talking about racial justice, and that is true as well with the eviction crisis that is currently happening.” Although eviction data are challenging to find, a study by the University of Washington suggests eviction rates among Black and Latinx adults in some cities are nearly seven times higher than for their White counterparts. These evictions are disproportionately experienced by minority households. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for myriad reasons including job loss, inability to work, quarantine measures, and general economic hardship, the number of renters facing eviction in the United States has rocketed. How might one quarantine without a home?Įviction is defined as “the forced removal from one’s home” generally due to the inability to pay rent. Emergency situations, like those associated with COVID-19, highlight the dreadfully stark implications of the interconnected nature of these human rights. The right to shelter, in addition to being a freestanding human right, is a constitutive element of “the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.” In other words, without basic shelter, a human being faces a gale force headwind battering down their ability to exercise their right to health. The right to health and the right to shelter are longstanding and widely recognized basic human rights. Soaring eviction rates that disproportionately affect minority groups are a multi-layered human rights problem. This Viewpoint discusses the intersectionality between discrimination, housing, and human rights from the perspective of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). This research is not only deeply concerning from a societal perspective, it is also illustrative of a wider human rights failure in the United States. One study illustrated that “people of color, particularly black and latinx people, constitute approximately 80% of people facing eviction.” Another revealed that, controlling for education, Black households are more than twice as likely to be evicted than White households. Troublingly, recent research shows the eviction crisis largely falls along racial lines. The COVID-19 pandemic has starkly highlighted the magnitude of the eviction crisis facing many tenants in the United States.
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