By Heather Tirado Gilligan, California Health Care Foundation, August 16, 2021
Jenise Dixon fell behind on rent after losing her job in the film industry last year. Dixon, who lives in Los Angeles, applied for rent relief in April and has yet to receive any help from the billions in federal funds set aside for that purpose. Despite her pending aid application and local and federal protections against eviction, Dixon’s landlord has served her with an eviction notice, Sam Levin reported for The Guardian.
The situation has left Dixon anxious as she continues to live in the same place. “I’m just doing what I can to survive,” she told Levin. “We didn’t ask for this pandemic, we didn’t ask to lose our jobs. We didn’t ask for all this turmoil.”
The threat of eviction and the resulting turmoil, fear, and anxiety have serious health effects for people at risk of losing their homes. In California, most of those facing eviction are people of color. For renters with low incomes facing this pressure, help has been slow in coming, despite legislation intended to help them.
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