Broad protections for multifamily owners, renters needed- National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC)

Broad protections for both renters and multifamily property owners – as opposed to simple eviction moratoriums – are needed to keep people housed as the COVID-19 crisis continues, according to the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC). Only 79.3% of apartment households had made a full or partial rent payment by Aug. 6, according to the NMHC’s Rent Payment Tracker. That’s a 1.9-percentage-point drop year over year. The NMHC’s findings come on the heels of an Apartment List study that found that a record number of homeowners and renters had failed to make a full housing payment for August. “We found that 33% of Americans failed to make their full August housing payments on time, the highest non-payment rate since we began running this survey in April,” Chris Salviati, Apartment List housing economist, said in an email to MPA. Still, the damage has not been as severe as it could have