[Absent last-minute federal and state pandemic aid, Californians
will be in for a rough new year. Some 750,000 Californians are set to
lose federal unemployment benefits the day after Christmas, and 2.1
million could lose their homes weeks later. ] [[link removed]]

AS PANDEMIC AID ENDS, CALIFORNIA FAMILIES FACE BRUTAL NEW YEAR  
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Nigel Duara
November 25, 2020
CalMatters
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_ Absent last-minute federal and state pandemic aid, Californians
will be in for a rough new year. Some 750,000 Californians are set to
lose federal unemployment benefits the day after Christmas, and 2.1
million could lose their homes weeks later. _

Jacques Gene and his 7-year-old son, Wyatt, at his home in Cool, near
Sacramento. They are among hundreds of thousands of Californians who
are bracing for the end to pandemic aid. , Hector Amezcua/CalMatters

 

In late 2017, a house fell on Jacques Gene. 

The construction foreman in Cool, east of Sacramento, was inside a
half-finished home when the rolling trusses that make up the underside
of the roof fell, collapsing the whole house. Gene, 46, suffered
broken ribs, a punctured lung and a concussion. When his coworkers
sorted through the rubble, he says, they didn’t expect to find him
alive. 

But he found work again, earning $70,000 annually as a foreman to
support his wife, their two kids and two children from a previous
marriage. Then the pandemic hit and work dried up. Gene exhausted his
state unemployment benefits and relied on Pandemic Emergency
Unemployment Compensation payments to survive until those, too, ran
out. 

Now he’s hoping the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program
picks up the financial slack, for at least a month. Both of those
pandemic assistance programs are both slated to end Dec. 26. 

As for the family having a roof over their heads, Gene makes late rent
payments of $1,400 on a two-bedroom house to an understanding landlord
— but he wonders when his landlord’s patience will run out.

The state eviction moratorium lifts on Jan. 31, and once again, Gene
feels the walls buckling around him. 

“Right now, I don’t know where I’m going to find money,” Gene
said. “If I was a single guy, I’d figure something out, live in my
truck, crash on people’s couches. But I’ve got kids I’ve got to
think about.”

Absent last-minute federal and state legislation, Californians
counting on pandemic assistance dollars to stay fed, and an eviction
moratorium to stay housed, will be in for a rough new year.  The
day-after-Christmas expiration of federal benefits will affect more
than 750,000 of them,
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to a study by the California Policy Lab at UCLA.

Little more than a month later, California’s eviction moratorium
lifts, meaning people who have been paying less than 25% of their rent
after Sept. 1 can be evicted for non-payment. A separate analysis of
Census survey data from the UC Berkeley found that Californians in
more than 700,000 households
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face eviction when the statewide moratorium lifts. 

The number of repeat claimants of unemployment insurance now makes up
80% of all claims, a signal that people aren’t losing jobs for the
first time, but rather entering the labor market and experiencing
another layoff. 

The number of new claims has tumbled from a high of 1.05 million in
the last week of March  to 30,000 in the last week of October. But
the number of “additional claims” — workers who reentered the
workforce but were then laid off again — has remained relatively
steady: a high of 178,000 in the third week of July, and about 160,000
in the last week of October. 

The results of the UCLA analysis are a “mixed bag,” said Till von
Wachter, faculty director of UCLA’s California Policy Lab and lead
author of the study. It’s a good indicator of economic recovery that
there are fewer new entrants to the unemployment system, but the
persistence of people re-filing for unemployment is concerning. 

“To me, that means the job matches that are formed are not stable
yet,” von Wachter said. “It means, one, business has not quite
returned to normal and there’s uncertainty in the economic outlook,
and two, it just generally takes time for workers to find jobs that
are good and stable.”

Even early in the pandemic, it was easy to guess that an unreliable
labor market would persist into late November and beyond, said Bruce
Mirken, spokesman for the Oakland-based nonprofit Greenlining
Institute, which advocates for racial and economic justice. 

“We’ve been screaming since March that something more long term
and serious needs to be done to help people on the margins who are
really just hanging on,” Mirken said. “That means more long term
assistance for renters, continuing cash payments, and if people
can’t work, let them stay home. How does it help anybody to increase
homelessness in the middle of winter in the middle of a damn
pandemic?”

As with most impacts of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the ill
effects of the stagnant labor market fall disproportionately on
workers of color, specifically Black Californians. According to the
California Policy Lab analysis, more than 80% of the Black labor force
has filed for unemployment benefits since the onset of the pandemic.
By the middle of October, about one-third of the Black labor force in
California filed a continuing claim.

More closures mean more people out of work, especially in hospitality,
California’s hardest-hit industry. Kurt Petersen, co-president of
the hospitality worker union Unite Here Local 11, said the union
represented 30,000 members at the outset of the pandemic. On Tuesday,
only 3,000 of them still had jobs. 

“We see a tsunami of evictions and a loss of housing on the horizon
both because (unemployment) is running out and the eviction moratorium
expires,” Petersen said. “There have been failures at every level
of government. I don’t see anyone stepping up to do what is
necessary to help these people.”

Von Wachter, author of the UCLA study, said Californians at risk of
eviction and the end of their pandemic assistance benefits should
prepare now to receive CalFresh benefits, formerly known as food
stamps. 

“I think it’s really important for individuals to start now and
see what they might be eligible for,” von Wachter said. “Because
it’s possible that many individuals in the group of people who are
running out of benefits never considered themselves being at risk of
having to plan to use those benefits.”

That process, said Los Angeles Regional Food Bank CEO Michael Flood,
can be intensive, “kind of like filling out your taxes.” 

Food banks have already seen an enormous uptick in usage — the Los
Angeles food bank has increased distribution by 145% since the onset
of the pandemic — and Flood predicts that number will only grow as
pandemic aid ends in California. 

Gene, the out-of-work construction foreman, said he’s worried about
taking a retail job: He doesn’t want to expose his 7-year-old son,
diagnosed in April with Type I diabetes, to the coronavirus. Like many
out-of-work Californians, Gene is waiting to find a job comparable to
the one he had before the pandemic — one of the reasons von Wachter
says the labor market is stagnating. 

All the while, Gene’s bills are mounting: $2,000 to Verizon, $1,800
to the power company. Debt collectors call from new numbers every day.
He knows the bills will all come due at some point, and may be a
matter taken to small claims court. But Gene said he can’t worry
about that now, while his family’s livelihood is at risk.  

“To be honest,” he said, “I would do whatever it took to get
something close to what we need to survive.”

_This article is part of California Divide
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among newsrooms examining income inequity and economic survival in
California._

[_Nigel Duara joined CalMatters in 2020 as a Los Angeles-based
reporter covering poverty and inequality issues for our California
Divide collaboration. Previously, he served as a national and climate
correspondent on the HBO show VICE News Tonight. Before that, he was
the Los Angeles Times' border correspondent, based in Phoenix. He
can be reached at [email protected]._]

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