Justice
An Emerging Coronavirus Concern: Eviction
For low-wage workers and cities, the real health emergency could be homelessness. So officials are advancing new proposals to temporarily halt evictions.
Neil Hutchinson, a 52-year-old stagehand based in Oakland, usually has a busy spring: The Game Developer’s Conference comes to San Francisco in March, Google’s Cloud Next conference comes in April, and Facebook’s big F8 conference comes to San Jose in May. In between, he gets calls to come help with smaller shows and events. As the conferences got canceled or postponed one by one on account of coronavirus concerns, Hutchinson got increasingly worried about paying rent on his apartment. In-person concerts dried up, too. By the end of the season, he expects to lose $10,000 in income.
“If this goes on longer than June, the outlook is pretty bleak,” he said.