On January 15, in the midst of a holiday weekend, New York state let its eviction moratorium expire. While national and state-level COVID-based eviction protections have largely ended, even as the pandemic has continued to surge, New York was one of the few holdouts to have extended those protections again and again. Only New Mexico has kept its program in place for longer.

The fallout could be substantial. According to The New York Times, New York state has received almost 300,000 applications since last summer for its pandemic rent relief program, which is now nearly exhausted of funds. The $46 billion federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program has broadly run dry. Meanwhile, New York City landlords have filed far more evictions than in any other major American city, according to Princeton University’s Eviction Lab. In the run-up to the coronavirus outbreak in early 2020, evictions were being pursued at a staggering clip, with 140,000 cases filed in 2019 before the pandemic put the entire process on hold. The combination of a huge backlog of recently reinstated 2019 evictions, in tandem with two years of forestalled cases that can now be pursued, should make 2022 a record year for evictions.

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