Let’s Unpack This
The Impending Eviction Crisis Will Devastate Black Communities
Like all things in America, an eviction crisis will hit Black people the hardest
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The impending eviction crisis is set up to become a catastrophic event for Black renters. To be clear, it’s going to be awful for everybody, but the problem will hit Black people the hardest. President Joe Biden came under fire after the original, Covid-inspired eviction moratorium expired on August 7. He’s since passed a 60-day extension that will expire on October 3, but he might just be delaying the inevitable.
The Pew Research Center, citing the U.S. Census Bureau, wrote that American renters made up roughly 36% of the nation’s 122.8 million households in 2019. Young people, racial and ethnic minorities, and those with lower incomes, which I’ll touch on in a bit, are groups more likely to be disproportionately affected when evictions resume.
Thanks to centuries of slavery and Jim Crow, paired with racial, employment, and housing discrimination, 58% of Black people are renting their homes. Black renters more than double White renters, who only make up 27.9% of renters, while Asian-led households are just under 40%.
Renters are also separated by income and wealth. A majority of the people in the lowest income quartile, more than 60%, rent their homes. When it comes to the lowest rungs of income, more than 87% in that category rent their homes. Black people are heavily concentrated in both of these percentiles and start to paint the picture of why this eviction crisis should be code red for Black renters, especially Black women.
Black women are the head of 32% of all Black households in America. They are also consistently lowballed and overlooked at work while making 63 cents for every dollar a White man makes. Black men lead 6% of Black households but are paid 87 cents for every dollar their White counterparts make. And that’s on average.
Black men and women working the same jobs as White men earn 98 and 97 cents, respectively, for every dollar a White man makes. If those salaries were expanded over a 40-year career and were to account for average yearly wage growth, Black people would come up more than…
