<figure>
 <img src="https://media.eaglewebservices.com/public/2020/8/1598893700394.png" alt="Sheena Mooney moving after being evicted from her Topeka rental home. Jim McLean / KCUR" />
 <figcaption>Sheena Mooney moving after being evicted from her Topeka rental home. Jim McLean / KCUR</figcaption>
 </figure>By JIM MCLEAN <a href="https://www.kcur.org/news/2020-08-31/the-coronavirus-killed-so-many-jobs-that-as-many-as-350-000-plus-kansans-are-at-risk-of-eviction">Kansas News Service</a>TOPEKA — As many as 40 million Americans – including 357,000 Kansans – face the risk of eviction in the next several months.An
 enhanced federal unemployment benefit of $600 a week that expired at 
the end of July helped people who lost jobs because of the COVID-19 
pandemic cover basic living expenses, like rent and mortgage payments.But <a href="https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/the-covid-19-eviction-crisis-an-estimated-30-40-million-people-in-america-are-at-risk/" target="_blank">a recent report from the Aspen Institute</a>
 says that because Congress hasn’t extended those larger jobless checks,
 the country could soon see an unprecedented wave of evictions and 
foreclosures.“America is facing an urgent and unprecedented eviction crisis,” the Aspen Institute researchers concluded.Hundreds
 of thousands of Kansans could be at risk, said Donna Ginther, an 
economist with the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the 
University of Kansas.“We need to understand that this (the pandemic) is a natural disaster,” Ginther said.In<a href="https://ipsr.ku.edu/covid19/images/Ginther_CoronaVirus12.pdf" target="_blank"> a recent report</a>, Ginther said the lapse of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Assistance —<a href="https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/cares" target="_blank"> or CARES Act</a> — is “compounding a crisis that is already terrible.”“The
 federal government is playing with fire right now,” she said. “If those
 benefits aren’t restored, you’re going to see a lot of hardship and 
deprivation.”Sheena Mooney, of Topeka, has already experienced 
it. She lost her janitorial job in March, fell behind on her rent and 
last week was evicted from her house.“It’s my home,” Mooney said as friends helped her pack up her belongings. “It’s so hard, you have no idea.”<figure>
 <img src="https://media.eaglewebservices.com/public/2020/8/1598893768107.png" alt="Sheena Mooney, lost her job at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in March, reacting to being evicted from her Topeka rental home. " />
 <figcaption>Sheena Mooney, lost her job at the start of the coronavirus pandemic in March, reacting to being evicted from her Topeka rental home. </figcaption>
 </figure>Mooney applied for unemployment but was told she didn’t qualify. So, 
her eviction wasn’t triggered by the loss of federal benefits.It 
was approved by the Shawnee County District Court between the May 26 
expiration of Gov. Laura Kelly’s initial order barring evictions and 
mortgage foreclosures and Aug. 17, when her new order took effect.<h2>Stop-gap measures</h2>With
 Congress stalled on a new coronavirus relief package, Kelly announced 
last week that the state would apply to participate in a stop-gap Trump 
administration program to boost unemployment benefits by $400 a week.In
 a statement, Kelly said using federal disaster relief funds to 
temporarily increase benefits to jobless Kansas is “far from a perfect 
solution.” But she said the program “is the only available option for 
additional federal assistance at this time.”In recent testimony 
to a legislative committee monitoring the economic impact of the 
pandemic, Kansas Secretary of Labor Ryan Wright said he was reluctant to
 participate in the program because it would take “several weeks” to 
reprogram the agency’s decades-old-computer system to process the 
payments. Plus, he said, the $44 billion earmarked for the program isn’t
 expected to last long.“What we’ve been told … is that we should only plan on three weeks of dedicated funding,” Wright said.More than 415,000 Kansans have filed for unemployment since mid-March.New
 claims, said Ginther, the KU economist, “remain stubbornly high,” 
particularly among low- to moderate-income Kansans making under $20 per 
hour.The number of Kansans filing initial claims is on the rise, 
going from 11,092 on Aug. 1, to 21,175 on Aug. 22, the end of the last 
reporting period. Initial and continued claims combined total 87,546.<h2>Bracing for the 'inevitable'</h2>Social
 service agencies are bracing for a surge in demand if more relief isn’t
 available soon, said Tawny Stottlemire, director of <a href="http://www.wefightpoverty.org/" target="_blank">Community Action Topeka,</a> an anti-poverty organization that helps low-income Kansans with child care and basic living expenses.“We’re going to see it just get worse and worse unless Congress acts,” Stottlemire said. “We’re going to see more homelessness.”Teresa
 Baker helps people avoid financial calamities like foreclosure, 
eviction and bankruptcy as a counselor at Topeka’s Housing and Credit 
Counseling, Inc. She’s been anticipating a sharp increase in people 
seeking assistance since pandemic-related business closures threw tens 
of thousands of Kansans out of work in mid-March.It hasn’t 
happened yet, she said, because the enhanced unemployment benefits have 
allowed people to scrape by. But she said a housing crisis looks 
inevitable if Washington doesn’t extend the benefits.“It’s going to happen,” Baker said.People
 fearing eviction, Baker said, should contact their landlord and attempt
 to work out a partial payment plan. If that’s not possible, agree to 
vacate their home or apartment before they’re evicted.“We don’t 
want to see people legally evicted,” Baker said, because that puts a 
negative mark on their credit record “that’s going to make it harder for
 them to rent in the future.”Kelly’s moratorium on evictions and 
foreclosures remains in effect until Sept. 15. She can’t extend it 
beyond that date unless the Kansas Legislature renews her emergency 
powers.“No Kansan should be kicked out of their home during the pandemic,” Kelly said when announcing the order. “That’s just wrong.”Vince Munoz, an organizer for the Rent Zero Kansas coalition, argues in<a href="https://kansasreflector.com/2020/08/20/how-lawmakers-can-give-155000-kansans-housing-security-cancel-rent/" target="_blank"> an opinion piece in The Kansas Reflector</a>
 that state or federal lawmakers need to cancel rent and mortgage 
payments all together until a vaccine capable of ending the pandemic is 
widely available.To protect landlords and lenders, Munoz wrote, 
taxpayers could “offset real losses associated with cancelling and 
suspending payments.”Steve Vogel, the head of the Shawnee County 
Landlords Association, said the governor’s temporary moratorium is 
warranted. But he said cancelling or suspending rent payments for the 
duration of the pandemic would financially cripple scores of small 
businesses across the state.“Most of the landlords that I know 
of, especially if they have very many properties, have acquired those 
properties with borrowed money,” Vogel said. “They have mortgages to 
pay.”Vogel owns 13 rental properties in the Topeka area. He says 
landlords are generally willing to work with tenants to avoid evictions,
 which he says are “a last resort.”“No landlord that I know or have ever met wants to do an eviction,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to go through that.”Kelly has said her administration is also looking for ways to help landlords.Jim
 McLean is the senior correspondent for the Kansas News Service. You can reach him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/jmcleanks" target="_blank">@jmcleanks</a> or email jim@kcur.org.

350,000-plus Kansans at risk of eviction in virus-plagued economy