In September 2020, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler urged more measures to help rental tenants. “While we’re in the middle of this pandemic, we need to do our part to protect renters from the tidal wave of evictions that we know is coming,” he said. 

A “tidal wave” is right. There’s now documentation that renter households across Oregon are on track to owe as much as $378 million in past-due rent by January 2021. Up to 150,000 of those households could be hit with an eviction filing at that point, a substantial number of them lower-income households.

A nationwide moratorium on evictions the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued is set to expire on January 1, 2021. An Oregon moratorium protects any renter unable to pay rent from being evicted until at least Jan. 8, 2021.

A Moody’s Analytics analysis estimates that by the end of 2020, the average back-rent owed by renters across the United States will be $5,400, accumulating to $70 billion by the end of the year. That could translate into up to 8.4 million renter households (20.1 million individual renters) experiencing an eviction filing by January 2021. 

That’s the warnings just issued by The National Council of State Housing Agencies in a report produced by the advisory firm Stout, Risius Ross LLC.

Many renters are struggling to cover their housing costs as the coronavirus outbreak, and its economic fallout, have now stretched about seven months, and as the pandemic takes a heavier financial toll on people who are at the lower end of the earnings ladder.

“Given what appears to be a slow economic recovery, it is reasonable to expect ongoing elevated unemployment, high rent burden among low-income renter households, continued accumulation of unpaid rent, and continued risk of eviction beyond January 2021,” said the report. 

The National Council of State Housing Agencies says state housing finance agencies in 33 states , including Oregon, have established emergency rental assistance programs since the virus struck. But the group says the programs will fall short of demand.

Get ready for chaos.