Southeast

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC) has publicly stated that there should no longer be a nationwide eviction moratorium, a position the Washington, D.C.-based organization has held for the better part of a year. The statement is in response to a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Dabney Friedrich on Wednesday, May 5, to vacate the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) eviction ban that began last year and was extended through June 2021. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people lost their jobs and could not pay their rent, according to the NMHC. In April 2020, there was a spike in unemployment claims with 14.8 percent of Americans unemployed. The CDC implemented a nationwide eviction moratorium, which would ensure that Americans who had lost their jobs or were struggling financially were not going to become homeless due to the pandemic. The NMHC stated that it believes the eviction moratorium is no longer a necessary solution with unemployment numbers decreasing and more and more people getting one of the three available COVID-19 vaccines. The association added that the best solution to help people afford their living situations is to provide Americans with the resources …

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A total of 498,000 Americans filed for first-time unemployment insurance assistance for the week that ended May 1, the U.S. Department of Labor reported Thursday. These claims were a decrease of 92,000 from last week’s revised unemployment claims of 590,000 and were lower than the Dow Jones estimate of 527,000. Continuing claims, for which data lags a week, increased by 37,000 to just below 3.7 million claims. The latest weekly first-time unemployment claims set another pandemic-era low and are approaching pre-pandemic figures — claims totaled 256,000 for the week that ended March 14, 2020.