By: Brandi MV McCoy
While the COVID-19 pandemic approaches its third year, evictions and utility shutoffs remain an active threat to Illinois households. Illinois representatives proudly tout the disbursal of over 90% of the funds allocated to the Illinois Rent Payment Program, but renters all over the state remain at risk for eviction.
Uncooperative landlords and an application process laden with hoops and documentation requirements have hindered thousands in applying for this aid, as well as other forms of assistance. From May – June alone, IHDA (Illinois Housing Development Authority) reported that 35,000 applications for rent assistance were incomplete or missing documentation. In late September, 428,230 Illinois households reported to a US Census Bureau pulse survey that they were housing insecure (indicating that they missed their most recent rent payment and had no confidence in the ability to pay next month’s rent). Without an ongoing eviction moratorium in place, an unfathomable number of Illinois residents will be displaced which will further exacerbate the COVID-19 pandemic.
Beginning as early as April of 2020, Governor J.B. Pritzker has faced pressure from local organizations and municipalities to call a state-wide mandatory moratorium on utility shutoffs. At that time, he stated that he did not have the authority to do so, which was promptly disproven. According to the General Assembly, (20 ilcs 3305/7)(from ch. 127, par. 1057) the governor has the emergency power to “control, restrict, and regulate… materials, goods or services”. Utilities are a necessary service for maintaining proper pandemic safety. When confronted, Pritzker turned away. Despite the direct correlation between periods of utility shut offs and significant spikes in COVID caseloads across the state, those with the power to ensure our safety refuse to acknowledge and act to mitigate the risk to public health and families across the state.
With 300,000 household utility disconnections in Illinois since June, families are finding themselves with little or no means to wash their hands or sanitize their clothes and masks, some of the most important precautions to avoid getting sick with COVID-19. On the same note, evictions often lead to over-crowded homes as people rely on friends and family members to keep a roof over their heads. This brings undue risk to people who are elderly or otherwise at a higher risk for hospitalization or death from COVID-19. Those without this option may find that their only refuge from sleeping on the street is a car or shelters in their area (if there is room), neither of which make pandemic safety feasible.
Across Illinois and stretching into Indiana and Iowa, 52 organizations have banded together in a coalition called #NoAmerenShutoffs calling on utility companies and the governor to suspend shutoffs and evictions in the grim light of pandemic safety. This grassroots, zero-dollar coalition has won four voluntary moratoria from Illinois utility companies over the course of the pandemic thus far and continues to grow and advocate that evictions and utility shutoffs during a pandemic are detrimental to public health and safety.
Pritzker has ignored these calls for action and more, including but not limited to 10 resolutions passed by nine political bodies in six different counties across the state of Illinois calling upon the governor directly to enact a state-wide mandatory moratorium on utility shutoffs. Instead, he has allowed the private utility companies to determine their own terms for voluntary moratoria and allowed the state-wide eviction moratorium to expire in early October, even though the 7-day average in Illinois has remained above 2,000 new cases since August 4th, nearly three months ago.
The pandemic continues while protective measures fall short for hundreds of thousands of households in the state of Illinois. Meanwhile, multi-billion-dollar companies like Ameren are running a profit of hundreds of millions of dollars every quarter in net income for shareholders. Corporations like utility
companies and big corporate landlords are allowed to move forward with profit in mind and no regard for the more than 28,000 people who have died of COVID in Illinois or the millions who have been infected, let alone those who will become infected as a result of inhumane shut offs and evictions.
It is well beyond time for Governor Pritzker to not only acknowledge the inhumanity of turning off someone’s utilities or tossing people into the street during a pandemic, but to do something about it.
Stop the evictions. Stop utility shutoffs.