COVID-era renter protection law slashed Virginia evictions, VCU research finds

By Madeline Reinsel

In 2020, Virginia received approximately $1 billion through a federal COVID-era emergency rental assistance program, which aimed to motivate landlords nationwide to postpone evictions of tenants who could no longer pay rent due to the pandemic. But in Virginia, lawmakers did not simply rely on landlords' goodwill.

Instead, they enacted a new, temporary law: Before starting eviction proceedings, landlords had to apply for the funds through the state's Department of Housing and Community Development. That legislation dramatically dropped eviction rates statewide, especially in Richmond, according to a new study in the Journal of Urban Affairs from the RVA Eviction Lab, a research group housed within the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The drop in evictions was a strong reversal from 2018, when a report from Princeton University identified Richmond as a city with one of the highest eviction filing rates in the country. But the trend was short-lived: After the state law expired in 2022, Virginia's eviction rate climbed back up to 90% of pre-pandemic levels.

"At that point, the cooperation basically evaporated, and filings, judgments and evictions have climbed back to where they had been," said study co-author Ben Teresa, Ph.D., an associate professor and chair of urban and regional planning in the Wilder School, as well as the director of the RVA Eviction Lab. "So I think the paper is really about leverage, and what it takes to get cooperation, rather than goodwill."

Uneven tenant protections

As Congress authorized emergency rental assistance funds in 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also created its own moratorium against evictions through the Public Health Service Act. That moratorium was meant to stop the spread of COVID-19 and protect tenants who lost their jobs during the pandemic. But within one year, the U.S. Supreme Court struck it down, spurred in part by pressure from landlord advocacy groups.

At that point, only a fraction of the congressional funds meant to prevent evictions had been used by the states, leaving many tenants at risk of eviction as states slowly distributed funds. But some states did a better job of distributing those funds than others. In Virginia, a central distribution system meant that almost all funds, which provided up to 15 months of rental relief, had already been allocated to landlords by the time the CDC moratorium was lifted.

"During the COVID-19 pandemic, Virginia really became a model for effective distribution of rent relief," said Teresa, who examined the disparity between states' fund distribution speeds in a separate paper in the journal Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. "Others were really laggards in distributing rent relief."

Crucially, he noted, some of the states that were slowest to distribute funds, such as Alabama and Georgia, were also at the forefront of the challenges to the CDC order. Landlords, Teresa said, may prefer to maintain control of their housing stock over receiving substitute funds from the government.

"What it really shows is why landlords would protect their power to evict above even getting paid," he said. "The industry left billions on the table in rent relief while they prioritized fighting hard to restore their right to evict."

"During the COVID-19 pandemic, Virginia really became a model for effective distribution of rent relief."

Relief for Richmond renters

Virginia's pandemic-era rent relief program offered a useful natural experiment, Teresa said, proving that monetary incentives must be provided in order for landlords to cut down on evictions.

"The uncomfortable conclusion is that you cannot buy cooperation," he said. "Absent a durable change in the balance of power, and not just incentives, there's not going to be that kind of cooperation."

But some landlords may still prefer to evict tenants instead of accepting rent relief.

"The underlying threat of becoming homeless, of losing your housing, is what allows landlords to set the terms of the housing conditions and so forth," Teresa said. "And so that's why those mechanisms are defended so strongly."

Without Virginia's requirement for landlords to apply for rental relief - alongside the state's efficient fund distribution system - evictions would not have decreased, Teresa and his study co-authors assert. That's especially true because Virginia has historically made it easy to evict tenants.

"Virginia has a vulnerable population alongside a relatively fast and cheap eviction process," Teresa said. "And those two come together to produce the relatively high filing and eviction rate that Virginia and Richmond have."

But several initiatives may reduce eviction rates in Richmond. Most recently, the state legislature passed a bill that lengthened Virginia's "pay or quit" notice period from five days to two weeks, giving tenants more time to pay past-due rent. The city of Richmond has also started a pilot program that provides attorneys for tenants facing eviction proceedings in civil court.

Programs like these may help reduce evictions in the city, long after COVID-era rent relief coffers have run dry.

"Nothing is perfect," Teresa said. "However, compared to other states, Virginia did well."