MAA's Response To Eviction Article

MAA's statement below in regard to the article published on August 13, 2020, by Mississippi today.

From the very beginning of the COVID emergency, the Mississippi Apartment Association (MAA) actively called for landlords to find creative and compassionate solutions to keep tenants who had lost their jobs or had their take-home incomes reduced.  Our members, which own and operate a significant portion of the state’s 350,000 renter households.in Mississippi, fully embraced this approach. 

MAA also called out non-members who tried to get around the thoughtful eviction moratoriums put in place, early in this crisis, by the Governor and the Congress in the federal CARES Act.  While the vast majority of apartment residents have worked hard to pay their rent, even if a month or two behind, some stopped paying altogether despite stimulus checks and greater unemployment benefits. 

Local, state, and federal governments have done nothing else to address the issue. John Sullivan, a policy director with national affordable housing nonprofit Enterprise Community Partners Gulf Coast recently highlighted: “The Mississippi Legislature looked fully at institutional needs and kind of ignored basic household needs in their allocation of coronavirus relief funds and are leaving it up to the federal government to make sure that families have a roof over their head and food on their plate.”
 
Having formed a Crisis Management Committee in the immediate wake of the COVID emergency and having paid incredibly close attention to all of these trends for the last 6 months, the experience of MAA is that evictions are not coming for residents in anything even remotely approaching the 204,160 rental households contemplated by recent media reports.  The apparent misguided assumption in those reports is that landlords, during these times, immediately seek eviction of someone who misses a single rent payment.  The vast majority of apartment owners and operators in Mississippi, many of whom are individuals with small operations trying to make their mortgage payments, need tenants, have demonstrated compassion for their fellow citizens during this crisis, and will continue to do so.  These same apartment owners and operators are, nevertheless, faced with difficult choices about those tenants who stopped paying rent since the COVID emergency and will owe 7-8 months of back rent by the time any court could hear an eviction matter. 

MAA fully supports the need for the Mississippi and federal legislatures to provide much-needed relief in the form of rental assistance payments.