cnbc | Key Points
- The coronavirus pandemic could result in some 28 million Americans being evicted, one expert said.
- By comparison, 10 million people lost their homes in the Great Recession.
- Here’s what we can expect from this crisis.
Emily Benfer began her career representing homeless families in Washington, D.C.
Her
first case involved a family that had been evicted after complaining to
their landlord about the holes in their roof. One of the times she met
with the family, one of the children, a 4-year-old girl, asked her: “Are
you really going to help us?” Benfer struggled with how to answer.
“I’d
met them too late,” she said. “I couldn’t stop the eviction. They had
already been sleeping on the subway, and in other people’s homes. And
you could see the effects it was taking on them.”
Today, Benfer is
a leading expert on evictions. She is the chair of the American Bar
Association’s Task Force Committee on Eviction and co-creator of the
COVID-19 Housing Policy Scorecard with the Eviction Lab at Princeton
University. Throughout the public health crisis, Benfer has been
investigating how states are dealing with evictions and sharing what she
finds in a public database.
CNBC
spoke with Benfer about the coming eviction crisis and what can be done
to turn it around. The interview has been condensed and edited for
clarity.
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